Hi,
with all the problems (esp. GPL) and Smalltalk, I really think there should be a "standard" Open Sourcish License for the wider Smalltalk community.
It has been a long tradition for smalltalkers to provide Goodies for free wirh sourcecode, but they never bothered to set up a "license culture": There's lots of great stuff out there, and acually either it's pretty unclear how the stuff is licensed (SmaCC, refactoring Browser, and the whole "Camp Smalltalk" stuff). Or it's even GPLed/LGPLed. Actually, I have no idea how SUnit is licensed...
The whole situation would be *much* clearer if there would be some "Free Smalltalk Community License" *and* a culture/community of using this for all the Open Source Smalltalk projects. And, as we see with SmaCC, the Squeak License is *not* this License: It's tied to much to squeak itself. This may not be a problem from a lawyer point of view, more something cultural...
Marcus
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 09:01:41PM -0400, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
In the past, there have been some fairly fierce debates about the kind of licenses we should be using with Squeak code. In particular, the point was made by me and others that LGPL was appropriate, if at all, only for libraries associated with a plugin. Many felt that LGPL would not have the GPL-like viral impact in the context of an object-oriented monolithic system. While many of these points seemed valid, my instincts led me to take a substantially more conservative approach, suggesting that --at most-- we should permit Squeak-L/LGPL dual licenses for such code.
I am once again concerned about the use of LGPL for squeak code, in view of the positions recently taken by FSF with respect to LGPL and Java-based libraries, which has taken the view that clients of "included" Java libraries are virally attached by LGPL. As understood from skimming blogs discussing the issues, Apache foundation has opted to eschew LGPL libraries, in part, because of this FSF gloss.
There is a thread on Slashdot discussing this at present: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/17/ 2257224&mode=thread&tid=108&tid=117&tid=126&tid=156&tid=99