"Andrew C. Greenberg" <werdna at mucow.com> wrote:
[SNIP]
> I am an IP and Patent lawyer.  After a careful analysis, and extensive 
> discussions with FSF and RMS on the subject matter, it is my present 
> view that GPL is unsuitable for use with a monolithic object image 
> system unless all code of that system is to be GPL'd.  While LGPL can 
> be made to work for things like plugins, GPL simply is "too viral" to 
> work in an open community such as ours.

Andrew - could you explain what you mean with "can be made to work"?

As far as I understand, GPL is a no-no since the concept of linking (as
used by FSF) doesn't really apply in the image world of Smalltalk. And I
agree with Andrew that the statements from FSF in this regard also
strongly suggest we should stay clear of GPL in the Squeak community. If
I have understood this correctly they haven't even bothered to try to
help us sort this out.

Reading the above I gather that Andrew also thinks LGPL is a no-no for
the image, but could possibly be used for plugins. All this sounds to me
that both licenses really should not be used if we can avoid it, is this
a correct interpretation Andrew?

Btw, currently there are three GPL packages (Mysql Driver,
BehavioralInspector and SWebMail) on SM and one LGPL package (GLORP). As
you can see on this page I also included a note about GPL being unfit
(the category summary):

> http://map2.squeakfoundation.org/sm/category/67a2f486-477c-44ee-9581-f28fb8ac5152

So... should we try to "do" anything about this? Make the authors more
aware of what their choice means? Later we might start
"branding/blessing" packages as being "base packages" and personally I
would vote for demanding such packages to be available under the SqueakL
(dual licenseing is ok of course) in order to be eligible for blessing.

regards, Göran