Sublicensing

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Aug 16 18:09:08 UTC 2003


On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 08:11:56PM +0300, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> As Andrew once said, absolute legal safety doesn't exist. As it appears,
> software patents are soon going to be a general problem for the software
> world to deal with. We are even less likely to find a complete solution
> to false accusations or honest slip ups.
> 
> But I'd feel much better about working in Squeak for the long term if I
> were no more exposed to these risks than the next open project, rather
> than having those on top of being excluded from Debian, having to always
> explain how Squeak is not free, but sort of, and the specific innate
> flaws of SqueakL.

Fair enough, but that only addresses one of Cees' points.  It would be
very difficult for anyone in the Squeak community who wrote (say) a
replacement VM to argue that they had done it in a "clean room".
Therefore, a rewrite doesn't really buy us much.  Right?

Joshua


> Daniel
> 
> Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus <schwa at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> > Cees raised a good point though.  Even if we were to rewrite big chunks
> > of the system, we would still have to worry about 1) accusations that 
> > the rewrites weren't "clean-room" 2) patents.  There's really nothing
> > that we can possibly do to rid ourselves of potential legal hassles.
> > 
> > Joshua
> > 
> > 
> > > 
> > > Daniel



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list