[squeak-dev] Re: what is holding back Smalltalk?

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Fri Nov 21 14:06:49 UTC 2008


On 21.11.2008, at 14:50, Janko Mivšek wrote:

> Hi Randal,
>
> Please excuse me but I need to support Paolo here. In sense that he  
> doesn't stick blindfuly to those license issues while you do. Again  
> and again. Please stop dividing Smalltalk world with such actions.  
> Squeak is/will be MIT, GNU Smalltalk is LGPL. OK, that is, don't  
> expose your anti-whatever license bias again and again. For the  
> Smalltalk as a whole sake. Please.


I understand your sentiment - I used to think the same about licenses.  
But this is exactly the kind of attitude that got us into the whole  
messy situation with licenses.

This was not an attack against Paolo personally or even against GNU in  
general - it's just that we have to be cautious where code comes from  
because it's easy to accidentally get infectiously-licensed code in,  
but it's much harder to remove later.

If there went even a single LGPL method into a release, the whole of  
Squeak would have to become GNU licensed. Read the LGPL if you don't  
believe this.

The only way around this is if the author of the LGPL code in question  
would explicitly allow that code to be used under the MIT license.

- Bert -





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