Debian and SqueakL revisited again...(was Re: Debian source package)
Andrew C. Greenberg
werdna at mucow.com
Tue Oct 23 19:52:53 UTC 2001
On Tuesday, October 23, 2001, at 12:22 PM, Lex Spoon wrote:
> Absolutely. Although, I doubt Apple really cares. Actually, open
> sourcing a program from Apple is pretty miraculous at all; I'm impressed
> the Squeak guys managed it! It's just so sad... The Debian complaints
> are legit -- there are places you wouldn't want to use Squeak because of
> its license.
The entirety of the MacOSX Kernel and core OS, Darwin, is open source
but for a few proprietary non-apple drivers.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
The existing OSA-approved license, APSL, is available at:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/apsl/
And, though the general indemnifications are no longer present, there
remain some obligations to indemnify Apple under some circumstances.
> Now, if someone *could* get an ear at Apple, there is the possibility
> that the original parts of Squeak could be re-released. That would
> rock!
From a legal and policy point of view, I'm sure we could get approval to
a modified Squeak-L, to the extent it embodied the corresponding
portions and concessions of the APSL language. There may be a political
issue, however, as Alan has seemed in the past VERY reticent to reopen
the matter with Apple legal.
>> As the contributors to Squeak hasn't signed over their rights of their
>> code to Apple the image currently contains code from several hundreds
>> of
>> authors and 99% of those have probably not even said out loud under
>> what
>> license their code is released - but you could perhaps argue that it
>> would be SqueakL if nothing else has been said.
The vast majority of contributions came from a small number of people.
I anticipate that, by reviewing the change logs, we can determine who
they are and what they contributed. It would be a small order to get
most or even all of them to sign on to a new Squeak-L, if anybody really
cared. Not a trivial project, but there is no real point in undertaking
it until we get Apple's sign-off.
There was, for a few versions (somewhere between 2.4 and 2.7), a message
that clearly stated that contributions and changes were, unless
expressly stated otherwise, made under Squeak-L. I don't think it is in
the present version, but it ought to be placed back, as a matter of good
legal hygiene.
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