I presume by "these sorts of responses" you mean Paolo's response to me. My response is driven by my responsibility as being an elected member of the leadership team, to ensure that Squeak 4.0 will have a completely clean license. We worked very hard over the last few years to track down every contribution to squeak since its beginning, obtaining legal documents updating the license, and it would be a shame if a mistakenly derived work from GNU Smalltalk were to taint the distribution once again.
Note that if (*if*) this were to happen, I would consider relicensing the wrong pieces on a case-by-case basis to MIT.
Another point (and a follow up on the "return class variable Blue") is that the very fact of having created a class variable Blue whose value is (Color red: 0 green: 0 blue: 1) might be construed as owning copyright on part of the image. You are so proud of living in a world of objects, and then restrict yourselves to old fashioned source code when it is better to do so... So face it, Squeak's image will never be clean.
Paolo