[Squeakfoundation]licensing redux

[Cees de Groot]

Mark Mullin <mark@vibrant3d.com> said:
>So I put in my vote for the concerns that have been addressed by Mono and
>wonder if anyone has any comments on the X11 license, since I spent grand
>total of 5 minutes looking at it and IANAL.
>
There's two kind of open source licenses, and the Wired article neatly
summarizes them at the end. On the one hand, you've got the 'political agenda'
licenses like GPL that mandate that every derived work is open source as well
- this viral clause ensures that no-one can "hit-and-run", like Microsoft did
when taking the BSD TCP/IP stack for their latest Windoze systems. On the
other hand, there's the 'here is some source code, be happy with it' license,
that is more relaxed about this possibility. The latter license is distinctly
more attractive to commercial firms, because they have the possibility to mix
open source and proprietary code and bring that out as a closed-source
product.

Then, there's the middle ground. I think it started with the GNU
Library/Lesser GPL, that allows the combination of LGPL and non-LGPL code in
a restricted way. It works well for shared libraries, for example - linking to
an LGPL'ed shared library doesn't create a derived work according to the
license, which makes distributing proprietary software possible under Linux.
The Squeak License also takes this middle ground. It is 'viral' in that
modifications to the virtual machine or the base Smalltalk classes must be
shared, but at the same time allows you to do whatever you want with the code
you add to that. I think it is a very practical and reasonable middle ground,
and meshes well with how you feel about what you will and what you will not
contribute. 

The Jini Community follows much the same model although it's not open
source (you can only share with other licensees, but becoming a licensee
is a matter of accepting a click-through license). Richard Gabriel and Ron
Goldman developed a pattern language around the idea of a community that
shares common code, but at the same time wants to compete with non-common
code. I think large parts of it apply to the Squeak Community as well,
so everyone should read it. You can find it at:

    http://jini.org/JiniCommunityPL.html



(Philosophically, I'm all in favor of the GPL, but that's because I think that
intellectual property has outlived its usefulness (if any), and that's an
alltogether different discussion).




-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B