[squeak-dev] Contributor agreement

Trygve Reenskaug trygver at ifi.uio.no
Wed Sep 24 13:50:26 UTC 2014


I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most 
important one should probably be called something else?
So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make 
a Squeak contribution?


On 24.09.2014 15:01, Louis LaBrunda wrote:
> Hi Jecel,
>
> Thanks for the history and all your efforts.
>
> Lou
>
>
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:56:16 -0300, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr."
> <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
>
>> David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
>>> The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
>>> the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
>>> else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
>>> image up to that point.
>> Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
>> have joined us more recently:
>>
>> After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
>> PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
>> in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
>> friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
>> deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
>> Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
>> they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
>> resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
>> a product.
>>
>> Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
>> terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
>> workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406). They also used
>> Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
> >from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
>> with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.
>>
>> Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
>> later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
>> was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
>> started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
>> license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
>> Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
>> do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
> >from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
>> strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
>> friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
>> distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
>> contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
>> whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
>> extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.
>>
>> The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
>> way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
>> yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
>> though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
>> considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
>> bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
>> fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
>> restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
>> them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
>> your distributing Squeak.
>>
>> Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
>> project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
>> Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
>> Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
>> OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
>> Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
>> people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
>> everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
>> to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
>> the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
>> wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
>> Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
>> checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
>> programmer initials).
>>
>> One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
>> Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
>> and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
>> problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
>> available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
>> Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
>> future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
>> other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
>> available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
>> but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
>> you all with these details.
>>
>> -- Jecel
>>
>>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Louis LaBrunda
> Keystone Software Corp.
> SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
> mailto:Lou at Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com
>
>
>
>

-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
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