sublicensing

Anthony Panos tonypanos at the-beach.net
Sun Aug 17 03:30:52 UTC 2003


I have been following this thread, and many good points have been made. I think it is thorny precisely because it "is" a political question. Let us do a thought experiment for a moment. What if Squeak was already licensed under the GPL? We would not even be having this discussion. It is as simple as that. 

To be sure, there may be many repercussions of this course of action. For instance, perhaps people may not have contributed to Squeak's development over the last few years if it had started as GPL (such as Apple, and Disney, etc). That is a legitimate question. But there is no question that the GPL is the most "free" license, in that it allows everyone to use the software and hack away at it as much as they desire, now, and in the future. 

Debian for instance, would then have no qualms at all about including it on their distribution. 

However, as someone recently mentioned in this thread, Smalltalk is harder to define in terms of source code "files" than a language like C for instance, or even LISP. What is source? what is image? classes? VM? etc, etc? This may make it much harder to apply GPL, and perhaps the BSD license would be better suited to Squeak because of Squeak's special nature. These are tough questions. But, I think we should ask for a vote from the Squeak community. 

I vote for the GPL first, then BSD licensing, then MIT, and then APSL. In that order. 

Whether this is possible is a much bigger question. I am just a hobbyist programmer, and not a very good one at that. Changing the license will require help from more knowledgeable and respected people to speak with the relevant people at Apple and Disney, etc. It does not appear that Apple, nor Disney, are interested in promoting Squeak for commercial purposes. Perhaps the leaders of the Squeak community could speak to them and convince them to set it free. 

I hope we can make Squeak more free, so it can spread and grow. The exact type of license is debatable, but I think we all agree it would be a great benefit to everyone if Squeak were licensed under one of the more free types of license. 





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