On Saturday, November 10, 2001, at 06:29  PM, Bijan Parsia wrote:

> From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia at email.unc.edu>
> Date: Sat Nov 10, 2001  06:29:07  PM US/Eastern
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: [OT] Re: GPL - freedom versus restriction
> Reply-To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>
> On Sat, 10 Nov 2001, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
> [snip]
>> Nobody here is "shooting it down," we are rejecting its lionization 
>> as a
>> panacea for freedom, and further noting that its "pretty simple rules"
>> are too simplistic to make it useful for a Smalltalk image,
>
> ...with incompatible licencing and desires from the user community. If 
> the
> base licence was GPL and we were all cool with that, it'd be ok :)
>
> Which is not saying that we should be, even if that's possible.

It isn't just the incompatible licensing with Squeak-L that is at 
issue.  GPL is acceptable in the large, and broadly used, only because 
GPL is only strongly viral with respect to changes to the program used, 
and not to programs created by using the GPL tools.

This was deemed not only a salutary feature, but essential.  Even EFF 
wasn't so naive as to attempt to require that GPL code be used ONLY on 
machines containing and running GPL code.

But this isn't so with a monolithic image.  According to RMS, EVERY 
PIECE OF CODE IN THE IMAGE must be GPL'd or compatible, or the image 
can't be distributed, if ANY GPL'd code is entered into the image.

GPL isn't just unworkable because of incompatibilities with Squeak-L -- 
its unworkable as a tool.