On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:

[snip]
> First of all, a few simple basic facts about licenses:
> 
> -If you do not intend to distribute your application to anyone - perhaps
> it is an inhouse application or just a private hooby program - then you
> are not restricted in much any ways at all. You can then for example
> include Smalltalk code covered by the GPL license into your own program
> and modify Squeak all the way down to the metal for all you want.

This holds only for a certain class of licenses, yes? I mean, if I had a
VisualWorks license that forbade me from "Reverse engineering, porting, or
exporting code" I couldn't just load up stuff in squeak from
that. Granted, if it's *entirely* private, I prolly won't get caught, but
that's a different issue :)

Indeed, as VisualWorks has a non-commercial license, if I were to use it
for commercial purposes "as a hobby" or "inhouse" I *would* violate the
license.

> -The author of a particular piece of software is the copyright holder to
> that software (unless the author works for a company which normally
> would give the copyrights to the company). The copyright holder decides
> to let licensees use the software under a license. A copyright holder
> can let different licensees use the software under different licenses.
> This is often referred to as multiple/dual licensing and is something
> that many people are unaware of. The copyright holder always has more
> rights than the licensee - for example the right to change the license
> or distribute the software under another license.

Hmm. Is this true? "I hereby license blah blah to do whatever I, as
copyright holder, can do with this code, including the right to
redistrbute under another license" Oh, and if I make the license
irrevokable, isn't it the case that I *can't* change existent licenses?

[snip]

> Details: An example of an incompatible license in this respect is the
> GPL which basically says that any code linked from the application
> should comply with GPL. 

But the viral bit of compliance only happens if you distribute?

[snip]
> Note: It would also seem to make it impossible to use GPL for any
> Smalltalk application when a classical image based Smalltalk runtime is
> concerned (which covers most Smalltalk implementations).

Yet wikiworks for VisualWorks is so distributed. Since cincom doesn't
license it for distribution, I think *they* must be ok. I'm unclear on how
non-bundled stuff works. 

Similarly, if I load up some GPLed code from GNU Smalltalk, edit it, run
it, etc. then post *just that modified code*, I surely have complied with
the GPL? What I can't do is distribute an *image* with that code loaded
in.

[snip]
> <b>Q: What license can I use for my modifications to the Squeak base
> classes or VM?</b>

Or for anything intended for inclusion in the core distro. I'm unclear
if/how modules will affect this.

Hmm. Also, for anything you want to distribute *as* an image, I'd
guess. I'm not sure how SuperSwiki projects fit in.

But this makes it a brainer. The no-brainer move is to use the Squeak-L ;)

[snip]
> <b>Q: What license should I use for code meant for inclusion in Squeak
> (contributions to the base image/modules)?</b>

[snip] 
Ignore part of above ;)

[snip]

Otherwise, it looked good and helpful to me.

Nice work.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.