Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> I think I have them and got them by asking Markus.
> 
> 
> I'm not completely sure who's doing the debian packages now or what
> their status is.  I see occasional discussions on the debian lists
> about it, and I thought I saw someone else saying they were taking
> over.  But they may have run into licensing issues, since I don't see
> the packages listed in the debian archives.

Well, I remember a name: Stephen Strafford I think. And yes, I have
talked to a friend of mine involved in Debian and there has been a lot
of discussion on the Debian list over SqueakL which apparently does not
qualify as DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines or something like
that).

This is mainly because of the export restrictions in SqueakL I believe.
So... tough luck. We will probably not see Squeak in Debian proper. It
should be able to pop up in non-free though.

Again, this shows that having an "obscure" (in the sense that few poeple
know how and what it is) license may sometimes be a problem in itself.

Another thought on this license issue (Andrew will probably correct me
if I am wrong) (and yes, this is a highly hypothetical issue but I find
it intriguing nevertheless):

As the contributors to Squeak hasn't signed over their rights of their
code to Apple the image currently contains code from several hundreds of
authors and 99% of those have probably not even said out loud under what
license their code is released - but you could perhaps argue that it
would be SqueakL if nothing else has been said.

And if I am not mistaken, in order to change the license of Squeak we
would need everybody to agree on the new license I guess. This means
Apple + SqueakC + everybody else who has ever contributed code into the
base image.

This is more or less the same situation as with the Linux kernel I
think. Linus can't really change the license because he only has the
rights to some of the code.

I also believe this is the reason that FSF wants contributors to their
projects to sign over the rights to FSF so that they will have the
ability to change the license in the future. Controversial perhaps, but
I think that is what they do.

Anyway, these are only observations. I am, as is Andrew I believe,
perfectly content with the license - in my eyes it is essentially a BSD
or MIT variant with some silly export stuff tacked on that hopefully
never will prevent me personally from anything.

And of course, IANAL and all that. I may even be totally WRONG in what I
have written above, but then I hope Andrew or someone with better
knowledge will correct me.

regards, Göran