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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