Hello,
Andreas Raab wrote:
Hi Guys,
There's another way of looking at this problem, which I'd like to point out. If we assume to have a "basic" and a "full" release, then we can effectively include in "full" whatever license there is. How so? Well, practically speaking "full" would constitute only a bundle of packages, which are loaded under their appropriate license. This will (naturally) lead to a pollution of the "full" image with potentially lots of varying license, but given that anyone who cares can use "basic" to load only the packages that fit his or her desires, that's no problem whatsover. Hell, "full" might even include GPL-ed stuff, since if you want to ship a system which is not affected by GPL, you simply load your packages (I wouldn't really want this but it sure as hell is an option).
GPL is a very sticky wicket for Squeak. I think we should be very reticent to include any GPL Smalltalk code any pre-package image, ie: full or such.
What end-users load after they receive the image is their own business and should not cause any responsibility upon the community.
Example, the MySQL driver is GPL.
So the point here is that if we have a "basic" and "full" release, the licenses of the packages loaded into full matter not one bit, except from what we think the most common users of "full" likely would accept (which I think includes BSD, MIT and possibly even more).
Of course, this doesn't really solve the problem at hand since for SmaCC and RB we're really talking about "basic" here. But it is worthwhile to keep this in mind - it brings us down to a discussion on a much more limited basis (for example, Jimmie's ezBoard example would fall through since this were a package loaded into full).
Well the ezboard example had two components. One was in image infrastructure contributions, the other the Squezeboard bboard package on SM.
The infrastructure contributions would need to be a community (Guides, Squeak-authority, whoever puts stuff into the canonical images) acceptable license.
Fantasy example: ***disclaimer Say they rewrote the socket code based upon BSD's KQueue or Linux's epoll(?) and whatever if MSes comparable. Say it doubled socket code performance and increased stability. Stephen, Avi, Göran and Cees were drooling over this contribution. :)
Would the Squeak-authorities allow the BSD licensed contribution, because the business required a no-endorsement clause. I would think this would probably be *basic* image code. If not for sake of discussion, consider the contribution to be *basic* image code.
The Squezeboard contribution would be an SM package and could be licensed most any way but hopefully not GPL.
I hope that makes my example clearer.
Jimmie Houchin
***disclaimer The example was merely a fantasy example to demonstrate what could be consider definitively in image code. I am in no way making any claims that there are any major problems with the socket code.
***no-endorsement clause ;) Please don't use my name any connection with claims against the Squeak socket code.