Announcing to the world..

Glyph Lefkowitz glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Wed Apr 18 02:14:04 UTC 2001


On Tuesday 17 April 2001 18:20, Doug Way wrote:

> > The Apple font problem can be solved; in fact it should be solved by
> > some code Duane Maxwell contributed ages ago. Don't know where it is
> > now.
>
> It sounds like the Stable Squeak image (from the Squeak World Tour) has
> resolved the font licensing problem...

FWIW, as far as the various open-source software guidelines out there are 
concerned, the font problem is not as big of an issue as the export 
restriction clause.  See http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html, 
section 5, "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups".

	"Some countries, including the United States, have export restrictions for
	certain types of software. An OSD-conformant license may warn licensees of 
	applicable restrictions and remind them that they are obliged to obey the 
	law; however, it may not incorporate such restrictions itself."

For debian's "official" position on this:

	http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=4260212&list=208

According to this definition -- which is a rehash of the Debian Free Software 
Guidelines -- Squeak does not qualify as "open source" software.  This means 
that GPL software can't be linked with or run on it.  Python has recently 
been wrestling with similiar issues... unfortunately, sorting such things out 
often means having to deal with Richard Stallman :-\  

I was going to ask this question a lot later, but since it's surfaced: what 
would it take either to buy the rights to Squeak from apple, or to convince 
them to release it under a less restrictive, more vanilla (e.g. BSD/MIT-X11 
style) license?  Why hasn't Disney done it already?  Could I do it?  I've got 
a dollar :)

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