People of Squeak,

This isn't going to be pretty. I can tell because my spider-sense tingles
when I think about it.

One of the things I called out in my proposal was that we should collect and
curate some of the documentation which is already available for Squeak and
Smalltalk. Before we can do that though, I feel strongly that we should suss
out the legal ramifications of doing so.

For example, I would very much like to be able to include Dr. Kay's The
Early History of Smalltalk as a part of the "Squeak Curriculum."
Unfortunately the top of this document says:"Permission to copy without fee
all or part of this material is
granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for
direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the
title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given
that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing
Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee
and/or specific permission.
HOPL-II/4/93/MA, USA
© 1993 ACM 0-89791-571-2/93/0004/0069...$1.50"

Since what I want to do (I think -- I Am Not A Lawyer) is republish this,
I'd probably have to ask the ACM for permission. While I'm quite prepared to
do so, before I can, I need to know exactly what I'm asking permission to
do, which brings me to the point of this message:

I need to know what license documents in the help system should be made
available under. I'm at a disadvantage here in a sense, because I don't
understand the split between software free-licenses and documentation
free-licenses. It really needs to be MIT compatible, if we're ever going to
release the documentation on the same tape as Squeak, but I don't know of
any precedent for an MIT-compatible documentation license.

While I'm excited to see how the Squeak community tackles this problem, I'm
also hoping that perhaps we might be able (at some point very soon) to reach
out to the SFC for guidance in this matter?

Thanks for taking the time to read this note, and thanks in advance to
anyone who can help shed some light on the problem.
-- 
Casey Ransberger
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