John Hinsley jhinsley@telinco.co.uk wrote: [SNIP]
Oops, didn't know that. Ok, so we are basically not going into Debian then. Bummer.
Indeed, especially as Debian looks to become much more widely used now that the diskpacks are being sold (for cost, of course!) in more countries. I see it working like this: newbie buys RedHat, gains feet and confidence, and at some point either has to spend ages on line (with possible ASP nonesense) buy a new commercial distribution, or go Debian. I'm thinking of it myself!
Yep, that seems to be the case. I started out a long time ago with Slackware, moved to RedHat and then Mandrake to finally arrive, where most all seasoned Linuxers seem to end up, at Debian.
Being noncommercial Debian has a few nice aspects - it won't go out of business :-), it won't ship bad stuff because of falling stock prices, and I can always (like in the Squeak community) easily get in contact with the responsible person. And the package system is the best I have ever seen.
The reason why I think Debian is important to Squeak is that there are plenty of really good programmers running Debian. And if we could attract a few of those to Squeak...
Andrew Greenberg wrote:
From a legal and policy point of view, I'm sure we could get approval to a modified Squeak-L, to the extent it embodied the corresponding portions and concessions of the APSL language. There may be a political issue, however, as Alan has seemed in the past VERY reticent to reopen the matter with Apple legal.
... and Stephen Pair wrote:
If possible, the license issue should be addressed...not because there are any real technical issues with SqueakL, but because many people seem to have problems with it because it is not blessed as an "open source" license (for a few technical reasons).
I think the requirement for a new license (if any) should be that it stick as closely as possible to the current SqueakL, and that it be blessed by www.opensource.org.
Well, SqueakL is probably already OpenSource (I guess) so I am not sure you really need to change it in order to get it blessed as that. People that only care for stuff being OpenSource and that actually do know what it means - are probably quite satisfied as is. But a stamp from Eric Raymond is always good. :-)
But being stamped as OpenSource doesn't make it "DFSG free" which means it still won't go into Debian. From what I have read on the net APSL1.2 is not "DFSG free" either - there have been quite a lot of discussion on the clauses regarding "making modifications publicly available" etc.
Debian has a rather high standard for software being free and I admire them for that distinction. Linux is spreading all over the world, especially in poor countries and, for example, the clause no 6 in SqueakL regarding "Export Law Assurances" might of course in an international view be a problem.
The two practical problems that I have sofar seen discussed with SqueakL regards compatibility with GPL/LGPL and inclusion in Debian.
If I remember correctly (and I didn't find it on the Swiki) GPL nor LGPL code can be brought into the base image but you can build a Squeak app and release it as GPL or LGPL. Is that right? Most people probably care about the last part I guess.
Andrew Greenberg also wrote:
There was, for a few versions (somewhere between 2.4 and 2.7), a message that clearly stated that contributions and changes were, unless expressly stated otherwise, made under Squeak-L. I don't think it is in the present version, but it ought to be placed back, as a matter of good legal hygiene.
Yes I second this. And perhaps we could complement the upcoming repository/modules system with some license mechanisms - easy way of stamping a license on a module and also easily have a list available describing what licenses play together etc.
regards, Göran