> Does Apple deserve a piece of the action for every instruction executed on iPhone?
"Deserve" is an entirely subjective question to which reasonable people can honestly disagree. To which reasonable people can express differences in degrees or in the margins.
The law (currently) says yes.
• If you write code that embeds or hooks directly into GPL libraries/APIs, then the FSF would insist that your creation inherits responsibilities under the GPL license and must be made available under a compatible license. In a sense, the open source community gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code for distribution on a PlayStation, Sony would insist that you comply with the license terms associated with their developer agreement. Sony gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code that relies on material supplied to you through the Apple developer agreement, if your app hooks directly into Apple iOS libraries/APIs, then Apple Inc says that distributing this software must be done in compliance with the license terms you agreed to under the Apple developer agreement.
1 and 3 seem to hinge on the ideas reimplementing apis is impossible without infringing on copyright for which google v oracle has already shown this isn't the case. For 1 whether dynamic linking counts is also still an unclear topic but still not relevant for the API portion. There is also the point that "and we limit the only way you can do anything on our device is via this licensed path" is different than "and these are licensed paths". Similarly it may be more steps but it still doesn't change that it's a forced contract to work on a device at all regardless if that's a direct decree or a forced path.
2 is a semi reasonable comparison but "and x does it" isn't proof "and therefore y is right". It could be that both x and y are wrong and y was just challenged first due to prevalence or that y is subtly different than x.
Google vs Oracle answered a very different question. In that case, it was ultimately determined that Google could mimic an API in their own code, when building their own independent work-alike system.
Whereas in the case of iOS applications, developers are agreeing to the Apple developer agreement and then directly embedding and/or linking to Apple intellectual property when compiling their binaries.
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As for the analogy I made to the GPL, this was only to demonstrate that the open source community also leverages the enforceability of license agreements to require developers who use GPL code in a certain way to comply with community expectations. It's the same legal principle, even though it's used to very different effect.
"Deserve" is an entirely subjective question to which reasonable people can honestly disagree. To which reasonable people can express differences in degrees or in the margins.
The law (currently) says yes.
• If you write code that embeds or hooks directly into GPL libraries/APIs, then the FSF would insist that your creation inherits responsibilities under the GPL license and must be made available under a compatible license. In a sense, the open source community gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code for distribution on a PlayStation, Sony would insist that you comply with the license terms associated with their developer agreement. Sony gets "a piece of the action".
• If you write code that relies on material supplied to you through the Apple developer agreement, if your app hooks directly into Apple iOS libraries/APIs, then Apple Inc says that distributing this software must be done in compliance with the license terms you agreed to under the Apple developer agreement.