We have a GPL project which we'd like to distribute on the MAS. In my (non-lawyer) opinion it's probably OK to distribute on the MAS, but we may not take the risk with our project. It's a decade old project with none of the early developers involved anymore, so we need to be careful about perfectly following the GPL.
I think the primary sticking point with the iOS App Store was the fact that even if you had the source code it wasn't possible to modify and redistribute an application to iOS devices without agreeing to Apple's iOS App Store terms, as that is the only way to get apps on the device.
If you have Xcode, or if your device is jail broken, then you do not have to agree to the iOS App Store terms to distribute and install open source software. How does this not satisfy the GPL?
I realise you have to agree to a license to install Xcode, and many users are unwilling to jail break their device (I wont do it). But GPL doesn't require your software to be installable by everyone who downloads it. How is that any different from, say, distributing software that only runs on windows, which cannot be used by linux users unless they purchase a windows pc and agree to the included EULA?
The same is not true, however, with the Mac App Store - you could easily provide the source that people can use to modify and distribute the application outside of the Mac App Store, so I think there is no problem with GPL'd apps in the Mac App Store.
What exactly would the requirements be? Do you have to distribute both binary and source code outside the app store, or is just source code enough? Seems like you should be able to have a binary-only distribution on the app store, and a code-only distribution on your website (eg: google code).
Avoiding a second binary distribution would be nice, our team doesn't do binary releases as often as we should — simply because of all the work involved.
This mess is one more reason to change to MIT or BSD, a process we had already begun for other reasons, and are soon to complete. We should be fixing bugs, not discussing the legal restrictions dictating precisely how we give our work to the whole world.