[Squeakfoundation] Allow MIT-licensed code to be part of "SqueakOfficial"?

[Jimmie Houchin]

Hello,

Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> 
> There's another way of looking at this problem, which I'd like to point out.
> If we assume to have a "basic" and a "full" release, then we can effectively
> include in "full" whatever license there is. How so? Well, practically
> speaking "full" would constitute only a bundle of packages, which are loaded
> under their appropriate license. This will (naturally) lead to a pollution
> of the "full" image with potentially lots of varying license, but given that
> anyone who cares can use "basic" to load only the packages that fit his or
> her desires, that's no problem whatsover. Hell, "full" might even include
> GPL-ed stuff, since if you want to ship a system which is not affected by
> GPL, you simply load your packages (I wouldn't really want this but it sure
> as hell is an option).

GPL is a very sticky wicket for Squeak.
I think we should be very reticent to include any GPL Smalltalk code any 
pre-package image, ie: full or such.

What end-users load after they receive the image is their own business 
and should not cause any responsibility upon the community.

Example, the MySQL driver is GPL.

> So the point here is that if we have a "basic" and "full" release, the
> licenses of the packages loaded into full matter not one bit, except from
> what we think the most common users of "full" likely would accept (which I
> think includes BSD, MIT and possibly even more).
> 
> Of course, this doesn't really solve the problem at hand since for SmaCC and
> RB we're really talking about "basic" here. But it is worthwhile to keep
> this in mind - it brings us down to a discussion on a much more limited
> basis (for example, Jimmie's ezBoard example would fall through since this
> were a package loaded into full).

Well the ezboard example had two components. One was in image 
infrastructure contributions, the other the Squezeboard bboard package 
on SM.

The infrastructure contributions would need to be a community (Guides, 
Squeak-authority, whoever puts stuff into the canonical images) 
acceptable license.

Fantasy example: ***disclaimer
Say they rewrote the socket code based upon BSD's KQueue or Linux's 
epoll(?) and whatever if MSes comparable. Say it doubled socket code 
performance and increased stability. Stephen, Avi, Göran and Cees were 
drooling over this contribution. :)

Would the Squeak-authorities allow the BSD licensed contribution, 
because the business required a no-endorsement clause. I would think 
this would probably be *basic* image code. If not for sake of 
discussion, consider the contribution to be *basic* image code.

The Squezeboard contribution would be an SM package and could be 
licensed most any way but hopefully not GPL.

I hope that makes my example clearer.

Jimmie Houchin



***disclaimer
The example was merely a fantasy example to demonstrate what could be 
consider definitively in image code. I am in no way making any claims 
that there are any major problems with the socket code.


***no-endorsement clause  ;)
Please don't use my name any connection with claims against the Squeak 
socket code.