Apple Pulls VLC Media Player From AppStore

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has removed VLC media player from the App Store, putting an end to the controversy on the license (in)compatibilities. Indeed, the iTunes page for VLC media player stopped working. VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont notes that he is 'not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.'"

Re:heh

[NJRoadfan]

Ironic that Apple has become the Big Brother they depicted in the original 1984 Macintosh ad. Then again Steve Jobs was always a control freak. Sealed all-in-one Macs with little upgrade options was his thing. When he left, the Mac II with slots showed up.

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[gnasher719]

I was a Mac user until recently, and an Apple II user before I started with Macs. But lately, I just absolutely refuse to use anything with their brand on it because of this precise behavior.

What behaviour? You mean the behaviour of a developer who is so desparate to defend user's freedom that he even prevents them from using the software in the first place?

What would be really fun would be to take the guy to court to get a declaratory judgement that publishing a GPL licensed application on the app store is _not_ in violation of the GPL and therefore not copyright infringement.

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

I was a VLC user until recently. But lately, I just absolutely refuse to use anything with their brand on it because of this precise behavior. Ohh, and the bugs with missing audio in some MPEG2 files that no other player has, and that they haven't been able to fix for the last couple of years.

Re:iTunes policy won't work on the desktop

[PopeRatzo]

It's OK, one day you'll look back on your iPhone and laugh at yourself.

BOOM! Oh, man, you really faced that dude. You, like, obliterated him. "Eating Apple's lunch" he said, and you were all like "More like eating Apple's ASS"!! Fuckin'-A right, eating Apple's ass. Apple is like so completely awesome, and you're awesome too for handling that weak-ass Android shit.

He'll think twice before he ever disrespects the primacy of the Apple Nation.

Apple totally rules. 4 EVER!!

Re:heh

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the summary conveniently "forgets" that the app was pulled *at the request of one of the VLC developers themselves* due to a licence compatibility issue.

No, that would be less sensational and more accurate - what was I thinking?!

Where do you think you are? Get out of here with your facts.

Re:iTunes policy won't work on the desktop

[PopeRatzo]

Chill out there, Pope. Everything will be ok.

Sorry, man. I get like all jacked up when we talk about Apple.

I mean, the dude said Android was "eating Apple's lunch" and it was, like, ON.

You can't be disrespecting Apple like that. It's just not cool to talk smack about Apple when their shit is like, the shit.

It's OK... I'm alright now. Just don't come with that weak-ass Android shit because you should just take that shit to the park 'cause maybe the squirrels give a fuck, but it's just not cool to disrespect Apple. Like, at all. Claro?

Tuesday

[SuperKendall]

the only reason he hasn't is continued rumors of iPhone on VZ.

Then he should be pretty happy next Tuesday.

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[nblender]

Simply not true. I'm both. A linux user and embedded firmware developer so for the most part, I knows my shizzle... My preferred environment is OSX because shit just works. I have to use Linux at my customer site and the fact that I can't play a .wav file in amarok or use aplay to play the .wav file while amarok is playing an mp3 is dumb. The fact that I have to futz around with xrandr to get multiple heads to work on my laptop. The fact that I can't turn off my laptop built-in speakers with a headset plugged in (even though windows on the same hardware manages to do it); blah blah blah blah.. Best example I can see yet? I gave my son my old Powerbook G4 and an Ubuntu 10 DVD. He got Ubuntu installed on the PBG4 and got Firefox, Thunderbird, Tuxkart, and so forth installed and running... But the fiddling was just too much... I mean seriously, in order to get the wireless working, he had to download a broadcom firmware bundle from openwrt.org, open an xterm, build a downloaded .c file to extract the correct firmware image from the bundle, install it in /lib/firmware/mumblemumble and reboot just to get wireless working.... He's 9 years old FFS... It took him 2 days of experimentation to get the wireless working. Eventually he decided Linux wasn't for him and reinstalled OSX...