Hi!

--- Stephane Ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> Hi 
> 
> We (esug) are in contact with some guys from the free Software foundation in
> europe. They told us that they may help us to advertise an Free Software
> Samlltalk day at ESUG (apparently they are religious about the difference
> between open source and free software) ... but when we mentioned squeak they

Yes, FSF has a rather "firm" view on the fact that there is a difference.
And there is a difference. As always - different license give different effects.

My half-wit guess is that SqueakL could be branded OpenSource (but noone has asked OSI
to do that I think). I would also think it qualifies as what FSF calls "free software".

But Debian's DFSG did not let it through as "Debian free" - they are even pickier.

> asked us if Squeak license has been reviewed or approved by the Free
> Software Foundation or
> OSI (www.opensource.org).
> 
> Can somebody tell me more about that and if nobody contacted these
> organization, is there a real issues why nobody contacted them or this is
> just because it just did not happen?

I think it just did not happen.

One problem to be aware of is that you probably can't develop GPL licensed apps in Squeak - GPL
doesn't play well with imagebased systems not licensed under the GPL (definition of linking...).

Since GPL is the "flagship license" of FSF, that is something they don't like of course. But I
still think Squeak should qualify as "free software" according to their definition. I think.

OSI should have no problems I guess and it would certainly be nice to at least be able to put the
"OpenSource" stamp on SqueakL.

regards, Göran

=====
Göran Hultgren, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
GSM: +46 70 3933950, http://www.bluefish.se
"Department of Redundancy department." -- ThinkGeek

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