[OTR-dev] LGPL and the App Store (Was: Problem during the Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE))

[Ian Goldberg]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 09:21:15AM -0400, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> There are open toolchains for iOS now and if you jailbreak your
> device, you don't have to pay Apple the $100 developer fee.
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/ios-toolchain-based-on-clang-for-linux/

Ah, that's great to hear!  I wasn't aware of that possibility.

> That aspect of the argument then is moot, if we want to get into
> technicalities.
> 
> Ultimately Apple doesn't care about this. They only care if a
> copyright holder protests. Since the app store model is quickly moving
> to Mac and Windows desktops, we need to find a way we are all happy
> that we can help ensure users have easy access to truly libre tools,
> especially privacy enhancing ones.
> 
> Obviously my support for ChatSecure with OTR on iOS makes this an
> important issue for me.

For sure.  There just needs to be a way for someone who wants to plug in
a newer version of, say, libgcrypt to do that.  With the above, it looks
like it's "just" a matter of jailbreaking (assuming everything compiles
and builds with that toolchain).  Still not ideal in my opinion, of
course, but it's something.

Now if someone wanted to abstract away the crypto gits of libotr so that
you could plug in different crypto libraries (the way java-otr works),
that might be interesting...  ;-)

   - Ian