On Sat, 10 Nov 2001, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
[snip]
> Nobody here is "shooting it down," we are rejecting its lionization as a 
> panacea for freedom, and further noting that its "pretty simple rules" 
> are too simplistic to make it useful for a Smalltalk image,

...with incompatible licencing and desires from the user community. If the
base licence was GPL and we were all cool with that, it'd be ok :)

Which is not saying that we should be, even if that's possible.

[snip]
> Many of us are quite proud of our contributions to Squeak, and think its 
> a good thing.  We don't use GPL with Squeak for one simple reason -- we 
> can't.  Not because we don't want to, but because RMS doesn't want us to 
> do so.

While I think it's a little extreme to say RMS doesn't specifically want
us to use the GPL with Squeak (I think at worst he doesn't want use to use
it the *way* we might well want to :)), on the other hand, it's quite
true, afaict, that we *can't* use the GPL with Squeak, and that it's
highly likely that we couldn't without completely unreasonable effort.

In spite of my not being in the "bearing various sorts of distaste for the
GPL and FSF notions of 'freedom' and tact", I don't see that there's any
more to argue about this. At all. The most likely way that I can see to
have a GPLed Squeak is to take GNU Smalltalk and start cloning Squeak in
it. If you're willing to dual licence your stuff, it can appear in regular
Squeak too. If contributers to regular Squeak are willing to dual licence,
that stuff can appear in GPL Squeak.

Personally, I don't much recommend that. *I'm* certainly not going to go
for it :) But I rather suspect that it would be not much more difficult,
and probably a *lot* more fun, to go that way than to do the legal/social
fight.

If there are "simple", plausible, licence mods that will make Squeak
acceptible to the Debian maintainers, then I would very much like to see
those happen. That's an issue worth working on, IMHO.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.