Sublicensing

Göran Krampe goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Tue Aug 19 20:37:49 UTC 2003


Hi all!

Citerat från Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca>:
> On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 11:54 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
[SNIP]
> > In other words, what Disney actually owned, we were careful to leave
> > behind, and Disney owns nothing else. Apple really did own all the
> > rights to its early implementation of Smalltalk-80 (as did the other
> > first adopters -- but not the later adopters).
> 
> I'm really confused by this last bit. This is the second time in recent 
> memory that someone has stated that Disney doesn't own any of the their
> contributions to Squeak. But that doesn't follow from the fact that 
[SNIP]

Yes, this has me perplexed also. I was under the distinct impression that Disney
in fact owns large parts of Squeak as of today.

So even if Apple were persuaded to change SqueakL - and again, why would they
waste any time on that - it still would only change the license for the core
parts that were developed at Apple. The Disney parts would still be under SqueakL.

> > As I said once before: at this point, we need better lines of code
> > more than better lines of license! However, I think there are a few
> > things in SqueakL -- the Apple license (the only one that obtains in
> > my opinion) -- that could be removed to make it smaller and simpler,
> > and this might be possible to do.
> 
> I would like to see this happen, and I'm willing to put a fair amount 
> of effort into it.

Personally I have actually come to the conclusion that we are pretty much stuck
with SqueakL. In short - I can't see a scenario where we would convince Apple,
Disney and all the other contributors (even though the others would probably be
easy enough compared to the Big Boys) to change SqueakL. And the latest news
Daniel gave us about sublicensing was discouraging.

The only route I still see to actually change anything is perhaps the vaguely
but still possible route outlined in my "loophole" theory. It has been verified
to exist in theory by at least one prominent Squeaker.

So given this somewhat gloomy outlook on actually getting SqueakL changed there
are two important issues IMHO:

1. Make sure we actually try to stick to SqueakL and not mess it up even more.
This is why I am badgering people about SmaCC and also pointing my big fat
finger to the Unix VM IanSqueakL.

2. Follow the loooooong winding route that Daniel has outlined into the future
by simply making sure we move more and more code over to a license of our own
and thus gradually rebuilding SqueakNG from scratch.

regards, Göran

PS. One final thing: Sure, better code is what we need. But if we postpone the
license issue into the future and Squeak suddenly (hey, who knows?) turns into
the hippest thing since Java - then it will be too late. The dragons will
awaken. And then I will not want to stand there and see them closing it all down
and realize that we could have done something about it earlier.

Göran Krampe, goran.krampe at bluefish.se
GSM: +46 70 3933950, http://www.bluefish.se
Smalltalk - a place where objects live, not a language.



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