Apple Can No Linger Force Developers to Use In-App Purchasing

I thought this article might be of interest to a lot of people here. Maybe these kinds of developers will move to the Librem 5 when the timing is right.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/epic-games-v-apple-judge-reaches-decision-.html

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Purism pulled Librem Tunnel from the iOS App Store over Apple trying to force them to use in-app purchasing.

Assuming there aren’t years of appeals, I wonder if Librem Tunnel might make a return to the App Store.

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The link: https://puri.sm/posts/why-librem-tunnel-is-leaving-ios/.

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I can see the Librem 5 totally eating Apple’s lunch after the Librem 5 goes mainstream. How can anyone compete with “free” as a medium to distribute their paid apps and to escape restrictive contractual agreements? Maybe there will also be free competitive apps in Purism’s app store. Then the paid app has to compete with “free” as their competition works only for Kudos.

Does anyone here know if Purism will allow paid apps in to their store? At least with open-source, anyone can open their own app store. Does anyone here know if the open-source GPL licenses will allow app developers to keep their code a secret to protect their profits?

This is the whole point. Purism does not need to allow anything. It’s your hardware.

This is a complicated issue. GPL license requires everyone to give you the code if they give you the executable. It’s hard to earn money with GPL…

See also the FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html.

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So it looks like everyone works for only kudos. But that’s how the whole eco-system works. It’ll be very interesting to see how the Linux-phone culture looks, once fully developed. I can’t imagine it looking too much like Apple or Android after it matures. We just need to get everything under GPL so that Apple or Google doesn’t come along and monetize any more of it than is absolutely necessary, with a free ride made possible by Purism.

Our whole culture might change back to be more like what it used to be before smart phones arrived on the scene. Government and big business will no longer be capable of spying on us and controlling us via our phones.

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? C’mon, Apple has been doing this for years! It’s their business model. How long did Mac OS computers out-sell home computers pre-installed with Linux (which is both free and Libre)? Well, forever, right? Apple’s all about style and convenience, which a large segment of the population prefers, even at the expense of privacy. However, just because the crowd wants it, doesn’t mean the rest of us should be dragged along unwillingly, so don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy with this decision by the courts.

I just can’t believe that Purism will ever “eat Apple’s lunch” and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you think that’s the case. BTW, if I’m ever wrong about this (and I’d like to be), feel free to rub it in my face one day!

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Where can I go to a shop and buy a computer with preinstalled Linux? I have been asking about that in every shop in the last two years in different cities and countries. Nobody knows that such computers even exist.

This is an extremely unfair competition, where monopolies force competitors out of the retail shops.

I don’t know if “fair” really enters into it here, in the business sense at least – “Linux” taken as a whole, is not really a business like Apple is, so I’m not really sure they’re even in competition (in a busines sense). I see them as competing in more of a philosophical sense. Unfornutately, philosophy rarely pays the bills.
From a business standpoint, I see it as more important that Linux, in all its forms/glory (and the larger free/libre softare movement) exist to provide an out for people that don’t want to deal with Apple/Google etc.

It is also hard to make money when you own a proprietary software and you have a GPL licensed competitor that is cooler than you.

So basically Microsoft was right when it labelled the GPL license as a virus that resets profits to everything it touches, and that also means that the GPL license is the best possible license for users.

In a future where proprietary software is a past mistake, there will still be a category of entrepreneurs that will need to invest their money in software and developers, even if the code produced will be GPL-licensed: hardware producers.

If you produce a phone, it will be your interest that people are able to use it, therefore you will need invest in software (and you will also benefit from other entrepreneurs’ software investments, since these have produced GPL-licensed code as well). Software will not be the territory where you compete, because that is the hardware, so you have nothing to worry about.

There will also continue to exist software-only companies. They will work on commissions from the hardware producers.

They said the same thing with MS Windows and Linux. MS ended up embracing Linux. So, you never know.

Again, nothing wrong in aiming for Stars, who knows, you might end up on Moon. Considering Purism’s size compared to Apple, if that happens, it would be epic. :slight_smile:

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Richard Stallman’s vision of free software was more like freedom of speech than of free beer. But the combination of having both a free phone (as in freedom of speech), while also having free software on that phone that is more like the “free beer”, is an unbeatable combination. We’ve never seen a society that has only PCs that lock you in to a controlled eco-system the way our cell phones lock us in now. What will a society of fully unlocked phones look like? With the GPL protecting the software, the profit motive for most code writers will wither away. Google and Apple might then say “we have better games”, to which any Librem 5 owner can respond “perhaps, but we are truely free”. If no one cares about their liberties, then perhaps Purism won’t eat Apple and Google’s lunch. What a sad world that would be.

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I admire your optimism, however my general experience with the general populace is they don’t care. All they care about is “Does it work?”. If yes, great; if not “Would not buy again”.

People do care about many things related to free software. In many countries for example the idiosyncrasy against being surveilled is high. And everyone cares about being forced to pay for all sorts of subscriptions for “services” that are nothing more than proprietary blobs running on a cloud.

The messages that the GPL sends are many, but one among these is simple: money comes once. You need a software and I produce it for you, so you pay me the hours. After that moment everyone will benefit from your investment. That of course would be your death if you are a software producer and you compete only through software, but it will be your salvation if you are a hardware producer and you cannot care less if someone will “steal” your code – you produce better chips anyway.

Hardware producers are the best hope for showing the world that the free software is the best investment model.

It makes one wonder if they will try to extend Linux and then extinguish Linux.

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GNU/Linux ecosystem it too big for MS to even think something like that. So, I think that does not sound possible. But again, as they say, never say never. So, who knows? :thinking: :slightly_smiling_face:

Microsoft didn’t exactly embrace Linux. You can run impaired versions of your favorite distro under Windows. But for Microsoft, they just don’t want you to put their Windows in a virtual box, running under Linux or forget about Windows all together. That’s what motivates them. None of the Linux distros I tried under Windows subsystem for Linux were complete. If you want to use a Linux GUI in Windows, you need to do a lot of custom downloading and configuring (hacking) on a per-app basis to get it working. After you get Nautilus running you may think momentarily that you’ve arrived… until you start trying to install and run apps and everything is broken. If all you need is a bash prompt that works in Windows, there are better ways.

Also, Linux under Windows is insecure. I got completely locked out of linux and was able to change the root password from a Windows Powershell to get back in as root. If Microsoft wanted people to be running Linux alongside of Windows, they would distribute a free installation tool that allows you to run your own installation from an official distro release instead of giving you only an impaired distro installation from Microsoft’s website.