ask for APSL? for real this time?

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Jan 4 19:54:41 UTC 2004


There has been a lot of discussion about Squeak licensing, and most
proposals require that Apple re-release the part of Squeak it owned
under a better license.  How about we go ahead and do that step, so that
further steps may be enabled?  Is there any reason not to?

If this does not happen, then a large portion of Squeak will remain
under Squeak-L and thus will be rejected by the Open Source Initiative. 
That status will be unable to be changed until *at least* the Apple
portions of Squeak are entirely replaced, and it puts extra question on
the portions of Squeak written at Disney.

I grow increasingly frustrated that Squeak is not included in open
source distributions due to the situation with OSI.  OSI will likely
never be convinced by arguments about the spirit of the license, and
without OSI's support, we are likely to continue to have trouble with
other groups such as Debian.

It should be a no brainer for a lawyer to release one of their open
source projects using the standard Apple open source license.  And even
if they say no, it will be good to know the situation.

IMHO, we should not even bother asking for something even more open such
as MIT-L, unless it is a verbal conversation and it can be preceded by
some probing.  We surely want to present a simple no-brainer proposal to
the Apple lawyers, and APSL is fine.

For reference on previous discussion, these two pages have a lot of info
and links:

	"Squeak-L"
	http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/159

	"A proposed license policy change"
	http://swiki.squeakfoundation.org/squeakfoundation/103


-Lex



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