hgm wrote:I had understood that iOS does not support fork/exec at all. Apps could still be made self-contained if it did; you could simply bundle a GUI with the UCI engines you want it to run, and it would satisfy the App-store rules. (And bundling is allowed by GPL, so any author of a closed-source GUI could include all GPL'ed engines, as long as they were run as separate processes.)
I think he means the OSX App store, not the iOS store. But i'm not too clued in or interested in all this really.
The link in OP needs an Apple ID to access.
The legal situation is a bit murky when I would try to circumvent the no-fork problem by writing my GUI as a multi-tasking operating system, loading the core image of an engine binary into its own memory, in a big array, and start a thread to run it, or implement its own threads through time-slicing the CPU with timer interrupts.
Do you really think you could do this !? With Xboard OSXboard, or some other project ?
One issue i can think of is X11. iOS apps can be cocoa only afaik. I don't know about OSX App store apps, but wouldn't be surpised if this was the same.