Licenses all over again

Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de
Fri Jul 18 08:02:17 UTC 2003


Hi,

with all the problems (esp. GPL) and Smalltalk, I really think
there should be a "standard" Open Sourcish License for the
wider Smalltalk community. 

It has been a long tradition for smalltalkers to provide Goodies
for free wirh sourcecode, but they never bothered to set up a
"license culture": There's lots of great stuff out there, and
acually either it's pretty unclear how the stuff is licensed (SmaCC,
refactoring Browser, and the whole "Camp Smalltalk" stuff). Or
it's even GPLed/LGPLed. Actually, I have no idea how SUnit is licensed...

The whole situation would be *much* clearer if there would be some
"Free Smalltalk Community License" *and* a culture/community of using
this for all the Open Source Smalltalk projects. And, as we see with
SmaCC, the Squeak License is *not* this License: It's tied to much
to squeak itself. This may not be a problem from a lawyer point of
view, more something cultural...

     Marcus



On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 09:01:41PM -0400, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
> In the past, there have been some fairly fierce debates about the kind  
> of licenses we should be using with Squeak code.  In particular, the  
> point was made by me and others that LGPL was appropriate, if at all,  
> only for libraries associated with a plugin.  Many felt that LGPL would  
> not have the GPL-like viral impact in the context of an object-oriented  
> monolithic system.  While many of these points seemed valid, my  
> instincts led me to take a substantially more conservative approach,  
> suggesting that --at most-- we should permit Squeak-L/LGPL dual  
> licenses for such code.
> 
> I am once again concerned about the use of LGPL for squeak code, in  
> view of the positions recently taken by FSF with respect to LGPL and  
> Java-based libraries, which has taken the view that clients of  
> "included" Java libraries are virally attached by LGPL.  As understood  
> from skimming blogs discussing the issues, Apache foundation has opted  
> to eschew LGPL libraries, in part, because of this FSF gloss.
> 
> There is a thread on Slashdot discussing this at present:  
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/17/ 
> 2257224&mode=thread&tid=108&tid=117&tid=126&tid=156&tid=99
> 
> 

-- 
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de  -- Squeak! http://squeak.de



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