Proposal for TWO official releases

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Thu Apr 18 11:08:42 UTC 2002


Maarten Maartensz <maartens at xs4all.nl> said:
>- To maintain TWO releases as a standard policy:
>    A. Developers' release 
>    B. Learning & Teaching release
>
The idea I vented a couple of times, and that met with only little resistance
is to have SqF produce a "core release", and other groups around SqF, in a
true chaordic manner, produce their own releases from there:
- Learning & Teaching release, by SqueakLand;
- Developer's release, from the SourceForge SqueakDevEnv project;
- Business Release, from the 250 people IBM Squeak eBusiness group;
- ...
(yeah, I'm dreaming ;-)).

Only "guarding" the core (probably most of current Squeak minus a bunch of
things like EToys, StarSqueak, etcetera - core being defined as "what's
necessary for *every* Squeak user", i.e. VM and core class library, probably
adorned with some networking stuff) would keep SqueakF's effort manageable. Of
course, the second important thing is to have a portal (a real portal) to all
the other Squeak bundling efforts so that people quickly find what they need.

>Finally (somewhat) in the present context: I agree with Lex Spoon's recent
>remark to the effect that "open source" is a more comprehensive term than
>the OpenSource.org admits, and that Squeak IS patently open source in
>coming with its source code. 
I agree, to an extent (see below). For all practical purposes, you can
use Squeak just like you can use any other open source package.

>I think it unwise to restrict the meaning of
>"open source" to what gets the blessing of the OpenSource.org: The basic
>principle of open source applications, after all, is that one gets to see
>and manipulate all the code of the application and not whether
>OpenSource.org or Richard Stallmann are willing to endorse it as open
>source in THEIR preferred senses.
>
However, there's a very good reason for this. If something is called Open
Source, you know quite precisely what you can do with it. Similarly, if the
FSF says "this and this is what we call free software", you know quite well
the rights you have when something is called "free software". It is important
to keep these definitions as clean as possible, if alone to help us battling
fringe cases (like what currently happens, mandatory pop-up ads in software
that's otherwise licensed as open source). 

Sadly, the Squeak License limits the rights of the licensees in ways that are
incompatible both with the definition of "open source" as with the definition
of "free software". Until that situation is alleviated (and if only to keep it
on the agenda), it is probably wiser *not* to describe Squeak as "open source"
(with or without the caps). 

My proposal would be for Squeak.org to say "Squeak is almost open source",
where "almost open source" would be a link to a page that explains some of the
issues with the Squeak License. 

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B



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