­Apple has removed the famous open-source media player, VLC at the request of the app developers, due to a conflict over Apple’s policies regarding sharing applications.

The source code for the VLC application is released under the General Public License, which requires that any derivatives are available to be shared freely. This requirement is at odds with the App Store platform which blocks such free sharing of apps its hosts.

Although an authorized variant of the desktop platform, the mobile VLC player has been controversial within the Open-Source community for the past few months over the restrictions imposed by Apple’s App Store, which adds a layer of DRM to apps it downloads.

The independent app gave iPad owners the opportunity to play files that were not officially supported by Apple.

According to one of the VLC developers who complained about the breach of the GPL, Remi Denis-Courmont, on January 7th, Apple removed VLC media player from its application store for iDevices. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents.

However, some proponents of the application had argued that while the App Store blocked sharing, the source code was freely available on the VLC servers, and it would have been better to leave the app live for downloads through the App Store due to its popularity and reach amongst casual users.

According to sources, understandably the man in the street won’t give a damn about the great philosophy of freedom behind the GNU license nor the evils of DRM. He will care only that VLC is not available any more and he can’t play his videos. For the man in the street this decision sucks and this statement from Denis-Courmont is insensitive to say the least.