On Tuesday, November 13, 2001, at 04:29  PM, Bijan Parsia wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
>
> [snip]
>> But the real problem is deeper.  GPL just doesn't work with monolithic
>> image systems, for the reasons previously stated -- it has the effect 
>> of
>> writing out of the license the (known to be essential) exception for
>> independently written programs.  At least not as RMS interprets the GPL
>> (I do believe there are strong legal arguments to the contrary).  In
>> part for this reason, no GPL'd Smalltalk system has been successful to
>> date, nor can it ever succeed, again, for reasons previously stated.
> [snip]
>
> There is GNU Smalltalk. I don't know if it's "successful", but it's VM 
> is
> GPLed, the core class libs are LGPLed and the browser and compiler are
> GPLed, all, I would imagine, with the blessing of the FSF.
>
> 	ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk/gst-manual/gst_4.html#SEC4

That was precisely the example I had in mind when I qualified the term.  
GNU St hasn't exactly generated a substantial community of developers or 
obtained substantial support or extensibility, notwithstanding the ready 
access to the corpus of GPL code.

> I have no idea how this flies. My casual perusal of the uppercased bits 
> of
> Andrews messages suggested to me that this wasn't feasible.

Indeed, it appears that FSF has shown greater flexibility for GNU 
Smalltalk than he did in Squeak.  Although, it is important to note that 
Gnu Smalltalk was developed prior to RMS' DLL paranoia, after which he 
took a substantialy more strident position.  I think, however, that 
armed with this, I may well go back "to the well," and ask him for an 
explanation of some of his earlier representations.

Perhaps a model of GPL for an underlying VM and LGPL for all Smalltalk 
image code might not have the inherent deficiencies I noted with the 
prospect of an All-GPL code.  I regret not considering this possibility 
earlier.

I am curious about the description of "Libraries" -- does GNU St use an 
image and module concept?