December 21, 2005 8:56 Daniel Vainsencher
I agree that a general (preferably not country specific) professional legal analysis of the license would be useful.
I think the points of interest would be:
- Risks in it for users, developers and redistributors
I asked Dan for users, contributors, and investors. I will mention redistributors.
- Analysis of its interaction with other code: fixes to existing classes
vs. separate packages, and MIT vs. Squeak-L.
- Analysis of the strategy I proposed a while ago for living with and
eventually replacing SqueakL. The strategy is: dual license all new code as MIT/SqueakL, try to replace subsystems rather than fix them. If its bad, propose an alternative strategy.
Dan has asked about these issues, and early on I pointed him to documentation that included your strategy. Cees has also answered a few questions for Dan to help get him up to speed. I got the impression that he agreed with your initial migration to MIT assessment, but there has been no agreement yet as to when and if to move forward on this. Cees has cautioned that this comes up over and over again. I would think that for now it would be best to answer Stef's question using the parameters he set (no change in license) and we can move to a more comprehensive risk assessment when (if) the time comes to change our license strategy.
I also agree with Cees that it would be good to have a general conversation between the new investor and Cees (language permitting) to get a general feel for what information they need, so that we can specifically address their concerns.
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com www.USMedRec.com