Hello All,
I met with Dan Ravicher, he is the Legal Director at the Software Freedom Law Center. We had a very nice conversation about the Cryptography Team's issues. We also covered general squeak licensing issues because of our talks with Cincom about porting their cryptography code to squeak. There are two things that need to happen before they will agree to represent us, none of which I believe will be a problem.
First we need to provide a legal entity and ensure we have permission to engage software freedom org to represent the community. I have worked with Cees and have been introduced by way of a very nice email to the board at ESUG. I will keep you informed on that progress.
Second we need to sign an engagement agreement to set up the Attorney Client Relationship. The agreement basically says they agree to represent us for no charge.
We have discussed registration issues for US Export of cryptography. They assure me that they can handle this for us and have agreed to start the process pending our formal agreement.
I also discussed the potential of porting the Cincom code and they agreed to help work out the issues if Cincom agrees with our proposal. I hope that these conversations will be fruitful since it would be very good for all.
We also discussed the general squeak licensing issues. Dan wanted to know more information about what the issues were in general and I have passed along to him a link to the license discussion page. The summary that I gave him was that we are covered under SqueakL but would prefer to move the entire squeak project to MIT and that there have been a number of objections to using LGPL. Cees has already pointed out once that those objections might be baseless but Marcus points out that LGPL may be viral and the license doesn't play well outside of C libraries. So I believe it would be a good thing to at least shore up our options so a decision can be made and a path to follow is illuminated.
I also mentioned our other lawyer volunteer Polly Dinkle, and Dan said he would be very pleased to discuss this project with her. I'm sure an introduction between the two would be very good. Matt I'll leave it to you. You can introduce the subject to Polly, do the introduction between Dan and Polly yourself, or I would still be very happy to have the meeting between the three of us first before the introduction.
I am happy to report the meeting went well and that it is my feeling that very good things will come from our new relationship with Freedom Software.
Sincerely,
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com Squeak Cryptography Team Leader