[ANN] Closure Compiler

Andrew C. Greenberg werdna at mucow.com
Wed Mar 26 17:12:25 UTC 2003


On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 06:05 AM, Cees de Groot wrote:

> This ugly discussion creeps up *ONLY* for the following purposes:
> - There are members of the community (me included) who would like (for
> various reasons) to see Squeak under an OSD-compliant license.
> - For this to happen, obviously the SqueakL needs to change.
> - In order to make this even remotely feasible, every single 
> contributor
> would need to agree with the license change.
> Obviously, this gets really really hairy if we have a multitude of
> licenses in Squeak...

Betcha it would be easy to do so, if only we can get the institutions 
in line and some consensus for a license.  90% of the contributions 
were made by only a few, and all contributions are signed.  We can 
excise the changes of those who don't go along and fix the problem with 
some, but not much, effort.  The question is not whether or not to make 
the change.  The question is whether it is worth it.

Until the change is made, however, let us not kill the product (making 
relicensing wholly unnecessary) by promoting the distribution of 
software under inconsistent licenses.  That would be foolish in the 
extreme.

> (*) I'm talking in absolutes here. To satisfy Andrew: nothing is
> absolute in Law. If Apple and/or Disney or whoever feels like it, they
> can sue you for not walking on the right side of the road. So there are
> no absolutes, I'm just making up a model of reality here in order to be
> able to discuss this whole thing without too many subsentences, OK?

The model doesn't relate to the reality under which we live.  We aren't 
discussing whether people may sue for being nasty without merit.  We 
are discussing whether they could sue and win because they have the 
case on the merits.  We are discussing whether or not to occlude a 
relatively clear and well-understood licensing scenario, however 
awkward and unsatisfactory to Cees and some others, with one that is 
hopelessly impossible.  You cannot "fix" Squeak-L by breaking Squeak 
legally, and to attempt to do so would be perilous.  There is a far 
simpler and better way:

	(1) live with the status quo -- it isn't that bad;
	(2) change the license by obtaining consents and excising 
contributions from those who don't -- it isn't that hard; or
	(3) clean room the product.

any of these will result in a sound project going forward.  What is 
otherwise being suggested here is madness, and while some may feel it 
might "force" the issue, it would do so in a way we cannot fix.



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list