On 25/03/2008, Jimmie Houchin <j.squeak at cyberhaus.us> wrote:
>  Yes, your insistence on your code remaining LGPL does affect the current
>  codebase.

Well, thank you for acknowledging that.

>  But that does not limit the rights of all the other
>  contributors should they choose to relicense their code under MIT.

Indeed not, but they were never given that chance were they?  Janko
decided that the license was now MIT for all contributors code without
bothering to discuss it with any of them.  Now, in retrospect, he is
trying to pursuade those copyright holders to accept the MIT license.
But perhaps, like me, they won't like being told that that is how it
must be after the fact.

> Yes,
>  the current distribution of Swazoo 2.x will remain LGPL.

Thank you for acknowledging that.

> But you don't
>  have the right to hold hostage future versions simply because you prefer
>  the LGPL and not MIT.

Nor did I say I would, and nor would I wish to.  Let's not forget who
is doing the actual infringing of whose copyright at the moment, hm?

What I asked for that the documentation in the Squeak source
repository be corrected to show that Swazoo is under the LGPL.  You
acknowledge above that Swazoo is indeed under the LGPL so, as you seem
to speak for the MIT-Swazoo camp, may I ask that you correct the
Squeak and SourceForge entries?

>  > You may remove my code if you wish of course, but while you are using
>  > it you are doing so under the LGPL.  And the same applies to the rest
>  > of Swazoo until you get the copyright holders to agree.
>
> He never said otherwise

But he did.  He announced that the existing Swazoo work (as in Squeak)
was either under no particular license or the MIT license depending
upon his mood.  He has only just started trying to contact the
copyright holders to ask, in retrospect, if this is OK.

>  And above he says he is going to contact the authors.

After the fact.

> So he
>  will have permission from the authors who grant such, and authors who do
>  not, apparently he will remove the code. Then the codebase will then be
>  clean of LGPL code.

Assuming all that, then yes, of course,

>  > What a mess you have made, Janko.  Why didn't you just leave Swazoo
>  > under the LGPL?
>
> Because he is trying to appeal to a broader audience than appeals to
>  LGPL within the Squeak community.

No, because he tried to do it by stealth and by infringing upon the
copyrights of others.  Janko never posted a "Should we move Swazoo to
MIT?" message to the Swazoo list, or anywhere else as far as I know.

Anyway, lets sort out the copyright infringement mess before we talk
about potential alternative licenses.

>  Personally, since AIDA/Web uses Swazoo, if this didn't get cleaned up, I
>  was going to not use AIDA/Web for projects. So this does have practical
>  impacts on the use of software within Squeak.

I am very sorry to hear that.  It is not my intention to harm other
projects but rather to protect my own.  I have a large code base now
that relies on Hyper and Hyper derives from early versions of Swazoo,
so just like you I do have "practical impacts" to worry about.  This
is not just a game.

>  Yes, he may have made a mistake in making errant statements about
>  changing it MIT without permissions.

He certainly did.  Now we need to clear up the mess.

All the best,
    Bruce
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