[Squeakfoundation] re: Allow MIT-licensed code to be partof"SqueakOfficial"?

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Mon Nov 17 10:45:21 CET 2003


Ian Piumarta <ian.piumarta at inria.fr> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Marcus Denker wrote:
> 
> > The Question is: Can the RB-AST *replace* the Node-classes in the
> > image, if it is MIT-Licensed?
> 
> As I understand it, the MIT license says: "Do absolutely anything you want
> with this code, except claim copyright ownership on it".
> 
> Most importantly, MIT is not "infectious" in the way that the GPL is.
> You can include all, or any part, of any MIT-licensed code in anything you
> like, provided you keep the boilerplate intact on that code (a class
> comment would do) in any source distribution you choose to make.  I cannot
> see any incompatibility with SqueakL there at all.  The effects of the MIT
> license do not "leak" out of any of the code you reuse, and whatever
> effect the SqueakL might have on the MIT-licensed code is completely moot,
> since the MIT license explicitly gives you permission to do *anything* at
> all (including relicensing it) -- provided only that the original
> boilerplate remains in the MIT-derived code.
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.  :)

I believe you are correct and as I said in another post - the only issue
I can see is that if we decide to sublicense it as Squeak-L (which I
assume there is no actual need to do, licensewise) then someone (a legal
entity) would need to do it. And I am not sure what it really "means"
for that entity, especially regarding mentionings of Apple and
indemnification etc.

So best would probably be to simply not sublicense it. :)

regards, Göran

PS. In short - let us allow packages under MIT in the base. But let's
not bring in any more licenses because the waters will otherwise get
really murky really fast.


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