beware GNU Smalltalk if you want to contribute to squeak

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Thu Jan 10 01:25:22 UTC 2008


On 9-Jan-08, at 3:02 PM, goran at krampe.se wrote:
> I mean, yes, Squeak v1.1 is available as of today under 3 licenses:
> SqueakL (the original license as displayed), APSL 2.0 and Apache  
> license
> 2.0. But that is just a tiiiiny bit of the current Squeak codebase!
> Still of course a nice thing - and you could take Squeak v1.1 and run
> from there and have a clean BSDish base to build on (Apache v2 is
> BSDish).

Correct.
>
>
> Then a quite large percentage of Squeak (IIRC right after Disney about
> 80% of the Squeak-at-the-time was in fact new code added at Disney)  
> was
> written at Disney and AFAIK that codebase is still only available  
> under
> SqueakL. There have been different opinions about the ownership of  
> that
> codebase - is it Disney's or Alan's team? If Alan is right and it is  
> all
> owned by them - then there is no problem. But... is he right?

Probably not, unfortunately. And that is a big problem in the board's  
discussions with the SFLC lawyers.

>
>
> Then we have all the contributions being made during the years. These
> are all considered to be under SqueakL and now - there is a great  
> effort
> by VPRI to get all contributors (or at least a majority of us) to sign
> that all our contributions are also available under the MIT license -
> which is one of the dead simplest most open licenses available.

It has to be *every* person that authored *any* part of the code in  
the image. *Any* version up to and including the version in the image.  
Which means that yes, we  will need to contact the families of several  
deceased contributors.
According to SFLC a majority is not enough, nor is it just authors of  
current versions. Basically "every bit is sacred".

I don't claim to understand the full logic of this but they are paid  
to be experts so I don't have to.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione =  
I'm not interested in your dopey religious cult.





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