Steve Burbeck wrote on Sat, 24 Feb 2007 13:43:00 -0500
Yes, I do have a Methods distribution from 1985 complete with manual, two floppies and the license. It is an interesting historical note that Digitalk license protected the binary interpreter but gave essentially unlimited rights to the Smalltalk Source Code including rights to distribute, sell, license, lease or loan them as you wish! So, anyone who wishes to reimplement the interpreter is home free. I would guess that it wouldn't be a huge task to repurpose the Squeak interpreter to run Methods. But with Squeak available, who would bother?
Though very off topic for this list, I have an interesting story related to this. I was building a 68000 based Smalltalk computer when Smalltalk V/286 came out with exactly the same license you described. This was before ParcPlace so Digitalk's Smalltalks were the only ones that mattered. Though it would have been pretty easy for me and the programmer who worked for me to build our own image from scratch just following the Blue Book the result wouldn't be entirely compatible with Smalltalk V and I felt this would be *really* bad for the future of the language.
So I exchanged some emails with Digitalk's Jim Anderson and then called him (if the emails were rather expensive for me at the time, an international phone call from Brazil was absurdly so) to propose that he let me distribute their image and sources with my machine. I would write my own virtual machine so Digitalk would have no costs at all and I was willing to pay some royalties. Note that through their license Digitalk had already given me permission to do what I wanted without paying them anything at all! But just because it would have been legal, I didn't think it would have been nice to do so without asking.
Jim expressed his doubts that I could do what I proposed and said he would think about it. I am still waiting for his final reply :-)
A couple of years later Digitalk did come out with a 68000 based product, Smalltalk V/Mac. And much later I found out about other similar projects they had with some academic and industrial partners at the time. So he might have felt there would have been some conflicts (my original impression that they were going to focus exclusively on the PC was wrong). I think they weren't very serious in their license and didn't expect anybody to actually copy the other parts without their virtual machine.
-- Jecel