Great news: José got the Squeak VM accepted into Debian, see forwarded msg below. The official page is
http://packages.debian.org/sid/squeak-vm
and the discussion leading to inclusion is here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=454635
- Bert -
Begin forwarded message:
From: "José Luis Redrejo" jredrejo@gmail.com Date: March 16, 2008 16:05:08 GMT+01:00 To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] Fwd: Web page with status of squeak license issue resolution? Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
squeak-vm has just been officially accepted in Debian. It will be available in the archives and mirrors tonight. In the meantime, http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/squeak-vm_3.9.12+svn1820.dfsg-1.html has the details for it.
As Bert suggested, dealing with the difference licenses in the sources has been the worst part of the packaging. I hope the package will be useful, I've tried to make it fully compatible with current packaging schema in squeak.org, but has added some things to make it more desktop friendly, thinking more in the teachers and students than in the developers who don't use to have problems in managing it.
Regards. José L.
P.S. The package contains a patch to fix a 64 bits problem and a license file that was lost in the svn, so maybe somebody with access to the upstream svn could upload these patches.
2008/2/26, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de:
On Feb 26, 2008, at 12:43 , Damien Pollet wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: José L. Redrejo Rodríguez jredrejo@edu.juntaextremadura.net Date: Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 8:46 AM Subject: Re: Web page with status of squeak license issue
resolution?
To: Petter Reinholdtsen pere@hungry.com Cc: Damien Pollet damien.pollet@gmail.com, debian- edu@lists.debian.org
El mar, 26-02-2008 a las 08:29 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen escribió:
Hi. We spoke together after your lightning talk on FOSDEM about getting squeak into Debian. You mentioned that there is slow progress in getting the license question resolved, but that it is a lot of work. Is there a web page documenting the status of this work?
Like
who need to be contacted, who is already contacted and who is
left to
contact?
As I mentioned earlier, we in the Debian Edu community are
interested
in including squeak into our distribution, and for this reason want to see it in Debian/main. CC to our list to keep the other
maintainers
updated on the squeak status.
I've found URL:http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/159 and URL:http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3733 but did not see any information there about the work on contacting previous authors to get them to agree on a relicensing.
Those page are obsolete. The relicensing process is described and updated at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6016
As the part of code that has not been relicensed is because contacting the authors has not been possible, current plans are rewritting
that
part of code.
About taking Squeak in Debian, I have an ITP over the squeak
virtual
machine (#454635) and I plan to upload it as soon as I have time to finish a couple of pending patches for 64 bits platforms. There are different ways to use Squeak, people from squeak.org are more focused in using squeak as a development tool, and people from squeakland.org are more focused in using it for kids and teaching
and
currently working on the OLPC project. My intention is to do the squeak-vm interface oriented to teachers and students and give to
the
interface as better integration with the desktop as possible.
For future Squeak images, as soon as the license issue is finished, we can work on different images. At Extremadura we have been working
on
customizing the image with a more updated interface, more eyecandy and adding projects from all around the world (Germany, Japan, Spain & USA) with a lot of educative tools. The project and the image is available at http://squeak.educarex.es. We have also made some interactive books for maths with the image. Those images are used in our school and
will be
uploaded to Debian when possible.
So, in brief, today smalltalk developers are needed to recode the small part of code that has not been relicensed yet. There are some
voices
that say that FSF allows releasing under a free license if the percentage of code without the license is lower than 5%. If that
were
true it could be done today, but nobody is sure about it.
Regards. José L.
A Fedora developer recently pointed out the mix of licenses in the VM source code:
Also note, significant portions of this package appear to be dual licensed under the LGPLv2.1+ and the Squeak license, neither of which are MIT.
./platforms/Cross/plugins/JPEGReadWriter2Plugin/jcomapi.c notes it is licensed and to read a README file, but no such file exists (contrary to the Independent JPEG Group's license). It might be considered free enough, but that's not entirely clear.
There's a boatload of MP3 plugin code here. MP3 is patented.
./platforms/Cross/plugins/SoundCodecPrims/ is missing a COPYRIGHT
file
containing the license for code in that dir too.
There's a lot of stuff under a Sun copyright with a permissive license.
There's stuff under the Squeak license, not dual-licensed.
There's Perl-Compatible-Regular-Expressions which is yet another license...
There's GPLv2+ code in ./platforms/unix/plugins/VideoForLinuxPlugin/ ccvt_types.h
(from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=247983)
We intend to clean this up, which may well end up removing code. If this hurts anyone, they'll surely implement a replacement ;)
- Bert -