[ANN] Closure Compiler

Andrew C. Greenberg werdna at mucow.com
Thu Mar 27 01:06:33 UTC 2003


On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 05:54 PM, Cees de Groot wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 18:12, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
>> Betcha it would be easy to do so, if only we can get the institutions
>> in line and some consensus for a license.
>
> And that, my dear listeners, remains the $1000 question for today.
>
> The issue is of course:
> - how, when are we going to take concerted action;
> - when are we going to decide that the institutions are not coming into
> line and keep hurting ourselves with license discussions and
> restrictions on what to include for a possible future?
>
> As a realist, I don't think they are going to bother. There's nothing 
> to
> gain either for Apple or for Disney, and there's a decent cost
> associated with it (I cannot imagine that they are simply going to sign
> on a license switch without due process involving a legal councel,
> etcetera). It'd be nice to think that they would be interested in good
> PR for us folks, 1000-and-some hackers around a great product, but I
> don't think so.
>
> As an idealist, I say we should attempt it nevertheless. However, we
> should *do* something (which, I fear, SqC should come into action)
> instead of debating this every 6 months.

I'm game.  Like I said, is there any consensus on which way to proceed, 
which license to use, and is the community willing to adopt it?  Then 
we spar with the masters, and see how we do.  If we fail, the 
alternative is the status quo (which isn't so bad) or a clean room 
under a new license (which looks like it would be fun).

Yes, it might slow things down for a while, but hey, what make you 
think that the kazillion messages we bandy about on this subject aren't 
making for worse.  There are FAR MORE EXCELLENT TECHNICAL WIZARDS HERE 
THAN LAWYERS.  IF WE SPENT A FRACTION OF THE TIME WE SPENT 
LICENSE-LAWYERING ON THE CLEAN ROOM, IT WOULD ALREADY BE DONE.

But first we need a consensus for a license.  What shall it be?

	a) BSDish?
	b) Squeakish with minor repairs?
	c) GPLish?
	d) dedicationish?

Moreover, are we constrained in any way by the original Xerox seed 
license?  (It has been suggested that the Smalltalk-80 image is free 
for arbitrary relicensing for the blessed seed companies -- is that 
true in fact?)   Or are we in fact constrained by Apple?

These will guide our decision.



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