Apple disallows D-Sources

[Michel Fortin]

On 2010-05-07 07:29:13 -0400, "Steven Schveighoffer" 
<schveiguy at yahoo.com> said:

> On Fri, 07 May 2010 07:14:34 -0400, Manfred_Nowak <svv1999 at hotmail.com>  wrote:
> 
>> http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler
>> -manfred
> 
> I don't see how they can possibly enforce this rule.  First, how do you 
>  tell that the language was originally one of the sanctioned languages? 
>   Second, for the Unity3D mentioned in the article -- I guess 
> developers  write in C# and it translates into objective C.  The code 
> exists as an  objective C project, how is that any different than 
> someone who wrote it  directly as objective C?  This smacks of the same 
> lawyer thinking as the  DMCA.  I hope Adobe challenges this as an 
> antitrust violation.

Most languages comes with a runtime. They just have to do some pattern 
matching looking for the runtime. Of course if you do things in secret 
with your own secret runtime and don't talk publicly about it, they may 
never find out. They may also enforce this selectively against things 
they don't want (such as Flash), but this adds a high level of 
uncertainty (as if there wasn't already enough).

They want the original source code to be in Objective-C, with no 
translation layer, so it bans pretty much everything out there. It's 
quite insane. I mean, can't I use yacc and lex? (They'll probably never 
look for this, but the terms, as written, bans this.)

I've been quite vocal about this on my blog. In case someone feels like 
adding comments, here are the posts in chronological order:

Collateral Damage
http://michelf.com/weblog/2010/collateral-damage/

A reconciling proposal
http://michelf.com/weblog/2010/reconciling-proposal/

Making their jobs easier
http://michelf.com/weblog/2010/making-their-job-easier/

I don't have any app on the app store, but I've manually translated a 
game from D to C++ before (Tumiki Fighters) for a client of mine who 
wanted an iPhone version. Strictly speaking, the new terms would ban 
this too (it wasn't "originally written" in C++), although I don't 
expect Apple to do anything about this. Note that the new iPhone 
agreement also forbid developers who agreed to it to criticize it 
publicly, and you can't publish on the App Store without agreeing to 
it. Scary.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/