Basic craft Mac questions

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2020 at 10:37 PM Thomas Friedrichsmeier
<thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 5 Jan 2020 07:42:07 +1300
> Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> wrote:
> > To my knowledge we haven't yet attempted to setup an account with
> > Apple at this time.
> >
> > I guess the first question would be whether we'd be looking to (and
> > are we even able to - didn't they have GPL issues at some point?)
> > upload applications to the Mac store?
>
> From what I understand, the basic problem is that the Mac store
> requires users to agree to their ToS, and those say - among other things
> - that you may not re-distribute whatever you get from the store.
>
> Now, arguably, that restriction is not terribly relevant as long as you
> can _also_ get the same software elsewhere, but technically it _is_ an
> additional restriction imposed on the user, and thus forbidden under
> the GPL. Thus, anybody with the right to any GPL'ed piece of code in
> what we upload would be rightfully entitled to ask Apple to stop
> distributing under those terms.
>
> Technically, and morally, the fault sits square on Apple, as far as I
> can see. Practically the outcome would be that Apple simply pulls the
> app from the store - and quite possibly everything else from the same
> developer (us) as well.
>
> In other words, that path does seem problematic, indeed. I don't really
> see, why it would be the _first_ question to answer, though. Getting a
> certificate and signing the distributed images actually looks like a
> good idea to me, in its own right. A second, separate step might be to
> submit images to Apple for "notarization" (which, as far as I can see,
> is essentially Apple running a malware scanner over the image). To my
> understanding, neither of these would preclude us from uploading to the
> Mac store, should that become possible and necessary in the future(*).

The reason why I asked if that was the case was because it may affect
how we setup any accounts there, should we decide to go down that
road.
I've gone through their documents and it seems that it shouldn't be
too hard to make people team members in the future.

I've reviewed Apple's requirements and unfortunately there is a
(yearly) fee involved in applying for membership of the Developer
Program which is needed to obtain the relevant Developer ID
certificates for signing. Additionally, they also require the signing
of a legal agreement.

We'll therefore need to get the approval of the KDE e.V. Board before
we can proceed any further with this.

>
> Regards
> Thomas
>
> (*): My guess is that it will eventually become necessary, but not
> possible in a future version of MacOS. But that's a story for another
> day.

Cheers,
Ben