Hi John, Andrew and all!

(CCed to Andrew since I hope he can help out a bit here.)

Background: People are discussing reimplementing Parser/Scanner in
Squeak using SmaCC (which is a new T-gen kindof tool but better). But
SmaCC is currently not under Squeak-L, see below.

"John Brant" <brant at refactory.com> wrote:
> > From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-
> > bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Markus Gaelli
> > 
> > Am Montag, 17.02.03 um 09:25 Uhr schrieb goran.hultgren at bluefish.se:
> > > Without having looked at SmaCC (I have used T-gen in that past though
> > > and also ehrm... Flex, Bison etc) I guess that it might be time for
> > > Squeak to move over to a declaratively generated Scanner/Parser instead
> > > of a handmade one.
> > >
> > > Are there any disadvantages of this that I am not aware of? Ooops -
> > > there could be a BIG one here. What license is SmaCC under? We need
> > > Squeak-L and it seems to use some other license (couldn't find it but
> > > SM
> > > has it listed under "other") if we are going to base Squeak core stuff
> > > on this.
> > John?
> 
> I try not to think about licenses that much. We make our stuff available for
> people to use and hope that we get some paying work in return (lately that
> hasn't been much). What license supports that? :-) As for releasing parsers
> created with SmaCC in a base Squeak image, we could probably license the
> runtime under the Squeak license (assuming that we can understand what that
> implies).

Hmmm, ok. I don't think the community wants such an important part of
Squeak as the Parser/Scanner to be produced using tools that are not
included in base Squeak (the dev part)!

Otherwise Squeak-L isn't that hard to grok. Well, perhaps that isn't
true - since it is the original license from Apple it does make it a bit
hard to realize what it means to release your own code under it.

Andrew can probably help out here but essentially I Squeak-L is similar
to MIT/BSD (and a bit like LGPL) - people are essentially free to use
the code as they wish, like for example embedding the code in a
proprietary product (no source included, charge money etc).

But exactly how Squeak-L works when you use it as the license for code
written by you, I am not sure. He, that is weird! :-) I really *should*
know.

For example, are improvements to your code done by others also forced to
be openly published (as changes to core Squeak are)?

Hmmm. Evidently it would be nice if Andrew could take a minute and
explain to us all *how* one actually goes about releasing a program (not
modifications to Squeak) under Squeak-L and *what* that means.

For example, where and how should the license be included and how should
it be changed from the original wording? I assume "Apple" should be
substituted with something else here and there etc.

Sorry for creating more questions than I am answering here... ;-)

A few links explaining Squeak-L in more detail that <<I dug up:

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/159

Note for page 159: It is interesting how Squeak-L actually seems to
force improvements done to Squeak to be published openly *even if not
otherwise distributed*. See 1274 below where Andrew confirms this.

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/934
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1274

> John Brant

regards, Göran

PS. There are also literally *tons* of postings in the archive about
Squeak-L, GPL, LGPL etc.