OS X Server (Darwin) Goes Open Source????

Peter William Lount peter at smalltalk.org
Sun Mar 21 11:12:10 UTC 1999


Hi,

Please let me clairify. Personally I think the Squeak licence will work for
me as it is. My comments were in response to Andrew C. Greenberg's
comments, which follow in quotes, to find out what specifically he wanted
to add to the existing squeak licence agreement:

"Last piece of follow-up.  Perhaps Apple will consider relaxing (and 
in some sense extending) its present license of Squeak, at least, to 
the terms of the APSL, so that Squeak's license can at least rise to 
the level of a full-scale viral GPL-style license.  I have not 
studies APSL carefully, but it appears to be a substantially more 
modern version of the GPL, addressing patent as well as copyright 
issues in the manner of the Mozilla license.

I'll give it a read-over this weekend, but perhaps the Disney lawyers 
ought to consider the opportunities this provides for Squeak and the 
Squeak community, at last "freeing" the last vestiges, if any, of the 
original Apple heritage."

Peter
Peter at smalltalk.org

----------
From: Ian Piumarta <Ian.Piumarta at inria.fr>
To: peter at smalltalk.org
Cc: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: OS X Server (Darwin) Goes Open Source????
Date: March 21, 1999 2:58 AM

> How specifically do you think the Squeak Licence should be adjusted?

I can't see anything wrong with the current version.  As far as I
understand it, it says: "if you improve Squeak you must make the
improvements public, otherwise do anything you want with your own apps
including selling them".  The Squeak license is therefore much closer
to the LGPL than to the GPL.

The first clause ensures that the community benefits in an open-source
style, and the second encourages commercial participation because
original apps (of little interest to most squeakers, but maybe with
huge commercial potential to the company) are *not* infected with the
open aspects.  On the other hand it requires companies to make public
releases of all improvements/fixes to the "base" system (which have
little commercial potential, but are very valuable for all squeakers).

It maximises both the user base and the "public payback", since
everybody will benefit from any "commercial" development of the base
system.

> When Eric Raymond & OSF bless an Intellectual Property license from Apple

The OSF have criticsed Eric Raymond for "blessing" the Applce license
far too quickly.  There are many reasons why the APSL is not an
open-source license, e.g:

	http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/18541.html
	http://perens.com/APSL.html/

Ian





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