Forwarding Address: OS X

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Ah, welcome back Forwarding Address. Sorry I've been away so long.

So, about Jenson's Cocoa license issue. It's not perfectly clear to me, but there's no license on Cocoa per se other than any Cocoa specific agreement you might assent to when agreeing to the Apple Developer Tools license (and there or may not be anything Cocoa-related in there, I haven't checked lately). Broadly, Apple can't revoke your right to use or link to Cocoa in your applications unless you violate some agreement. If the Developer Tools license agreement says nothing about your specific use of the tools and/or Cocoa, then you can't be held liable for doing something you didn't know and agree to knowing was not allowed.

Of course, IANAL, so I'm chasing this up, but I do work with a lot of intellectual property lawyers, and this is the general interpretation I get. Note that this is entirely different from agreeing to a license and then to have the licensor find you to be violating it, as was the case with Apple's iTunes SDK and iCommune a while back.