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Free42 for iOS likely to end soon
04-29-2017, 02:06 PM (This post was last modified: 04-30-2017 03:27 AM by Thomas Okken.)
Post: #19
RE: Free42 for iOS likely to end soon
Thank you all for your kind words!

I sent this email to Tim Cook:
(this post edited 4/29 11:26 PM EDT to include relevant message headers)

Quote:From: thomasokken@gmail.com
To: tcook@apple.com
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2017 09:56:25 -0400
Subject: Apple banning the word Free from iOS app names

Dear Mr. Cook,

I am a professional software developer, who has also devoted thousands of hours of his free time to Free Software development. My most substantial contribution to this altruistic mode of software creation is an application called Free42, which I first released for Linux, Windows, and PalmOS in November 2004, and which I first released for iOS five years later. The app has somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 active users across the five major platforms, MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Last week, I submitted an update to iTunes Connect; the 22nd since the initial release in November 2009. This update was rejected, because of the word "Free" in its name. Apparently, that word runs afoul of article 2.3.7 of the App Store Review Guidelines, and Apple, apparently, has decided to tighten its interpretation of that article, so that a name that no one has had a problem with for over seven years is suddenly ruled inadmissible.

I would like to ask you to consider the wisdom of applying that rule in this manner. Yes, my app has the word Free in its name, and it is in fact free, both in the $0 sense, and in the Free Software sense: it has been released under the terms of the GPL from the very beginning. But is there anything unfair or misleading about that name? Or is it considered problematic that there are not-for-profit developers who are proud of what they're doing, and advertise that fact?

For a company that owes the existence of its platform to a famous piece of software with the word Free in its name, FreeBSD, this new policy, or its newly strict mode of enforcement, is incomprehensible, and I sincerely hope that you will reconsider it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Yours sincerely,

Thomas Okken

I don't expect much, but who knows.
"Nee heb je, ja kun je krijgen" -- Dutch maxim
"No is what you have, yes is what you might get."
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RE: Free42 for iOS likely to end soon - Thomas Okken - 04-29-2017 02:06 PM



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