On 21.11.2008, at 14:50, Janko Mivšek wrote:
Hi Randal,
Please excuse me but I need to support Paolo here. In sense that he doesn't stick blindfuly to those license issues while you do. Again and again. Please stop dividing Smalltalk world with such actions. Squeak is/will be MIT, GNU Smalltalk is LGPL. OK, that is, don't expose your anti-whatever license bias again and again. For the Smalltalk as a whole sake. Please.
I understand your sentiment - I used to think the same about licenses. But this is exactly the kind of attitude that got us into the whole messy situation with licenses.
This was not an attack against Paolo personally or even against GNU in general - it's just that we have to be cautious where code comes from because it's easy to accidentally get infectiously-licensed code in, but it's much harder to remove later.
If there went even a single LGPL method into a release, the whole of Squeak would have to become GNU licensed. Read the LGPL if you don't believe this.
The only way around this is if the author of the LGPL code in question would explicitly allow that code to be used under the MIT license.
- Bert -