John Hinsley <jhinsley at telinco.co.uk> wrote:
[SNIP]
> > Oops, didn't know that. Ok, so we are basically not going into Debian
> > then.
> > Bummer.
> 
> Indeed, especially as Debian looks to become much more widely used now
> that the diskpacks are being sold (for cost, of course!) in more
> countries. I see it working like this: newbie buys RedHat, gains feet
> and confidence, and at some point either has to spend ages on line (with
> possible ASP nonesense) buy a new commercial distribution, or go Debian.
> I'm thinking of it myself!

Yep, that seems to be the case. I started out a long time ago with
Slackware, moved to RedHat and then Mandrake to finally arrive, where
most all seasoned Linuxers seem to end up, at Debian.

Being noncommercial Debian has a few nice aspects - it won't go out of
business :-), it won't ship bad stuff because of falling stock prices,
and I can always (like in the Squeak community) easily get in contact
with the responsible person. And the package system is the best I have
ever seen.

The reason why I think Debian is important to Squeak is that there are
plenty of really good programmers running Debian. And if we could
attract a few of those to Squeak...

Andrew Greenberg wrote:
> From a legal and policy point of view, I'm sure we could get approval to 
> a modified Squeak-L, to the extent it embodied the corresponding 
> portions and concessions of the APSL language.  There may be a political 
> issue, however, as Alan has seemed in the past VERY reticent to reopen 
> the matter with Apple legal.

... and Stephen Pair wrote:
> If possible, the license issue should be addressed...not because there
> are any real 
> technical issues with SqueakL, but because many people seem to have
> problems with it 
> because it is not blessed as an "open source" license (for a few
> technical reasons).
>
> I think the requirement for a new license (if any) should be that it
> stick as closely 
> as possible to the current SqueakL, and that it be blessed by
> www.opensource.org.

Well, SqueakL is probably already OpenSource (I guess) so I am not sure
you really need to change it in order to get it blessed as that. People
that only care for stuff being OpenSource and that actually do know what
it means - are probably quite satisfied as is. But a stamp from Eric
Raymond is always good. :-)

But being stamped as OpenSource doesn't make it "DFSG free" which means
it still won't go into Debian. From what I have read on the net APSL1.2
is not "DFSG free" either - there have been quite a lot of discussion on
the clauses regarding "making modifications publicly available" etc.

Debian has a rather high standard for software being free and I admire
them for that distinction. Linux is spreading all over the world,
especially in poor countries and, for example, the clause no 6 in
SqueakL regarding "Export Law Assurances" might of course in an
international view be a problem.

The two practical problems that I have sofar seen discussed with SqueakL
regards compatibility with GPL/LGPL and inclusion in Debian.

If I remember correctly (and I didn't find it on the Swiki) GPL nor LGPL
code can be brought into the base image but you can build a Squeak app
and release it as GPL or LGPL. Is that right? Most people probably care
about the last part I guess.

Andrew Greenberg also wrote:
> There was, for a few versions (somewhere between 2.4 and 2.7), a message 
> that clearly stated that contributions and changes were, unless 
> expressly stated otherwise, made under Squeak-L.  I don't think it is in 
> the present version, but it ought to be placed back, as a matter of good 
> legal hygiene.

Yes I second this. And perhaps we could complement the upcoming
repository/modules system with some license mechanisms - easy way of
stamping a license on a module and also easily have a list available
describing what licenses play together etc.

regards, Göran