Sublicensing

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Tue Aug 19 18:54:40 UTC 2003


I hate to be the kid in the crowd who noticed the Emporer was naked, 
but do the people on this list -- or for that matter, does anyone on 
the planet -- actually know what the law is here? From my 
perspective, having been involved in part of the gradual merging of 
lawyers and computer ideas, there is no "good law" about any of this 
stuff at present. I believe people are getting quite misled by the 
fact that anything, including nonsense, can be written down in 
language. This has nothing much to do with either logic and/or moral 
stances that would be good to take.

Just to take one of many examples: at present no one really knows 
what "fair use" really means, or even should mean. We know that many 
business interests would like to get rid of most, if not all, of the 
old ideas about "fair use", but regardless, it's not clear what the 
term even means right now.

Another example is Squeak Central at Disney. You can imagine that I 
got asked quite often (especially for the first 3 years we were 
there) about the IP issues regarding Squeak. I consistently told them 
that they should think of Squeak as an environment of "agencies" that 
are good for making things but that they don't own or control -- and 
to use Java (owned by Sun) as an example. So content creations in 
either system could be owned by them and used by them in commerce, 
but that the foundations of the systems were owned elsewhere (Java by 
Sun, and Squeak by the world). I used the important phrase in the 
Squeak license to explain why we put out to open source all non 
Disney content code that could contribute to making Squeak more 
powerful and useful for everyone. When we left Disney we were very 
careful to leave all Disney content behind -- and this was partly 
done by having a separate Disney update server to keep the public and 
private Squeak stuff separated. Michael Eisner and his staff of 
Disney lawyers, some of the toughest IP hawks you'll ever meet, 
eventually decided that what we were doing was kosher, reasonable and 
a good interpretation of the license we made while at Apple.

In other words, what Disney actually owned, we were careful to leave 
behind, and Disney owns nothing else. Apple really did own all the 
rights to its early implementation of Smalltalk-80 (as did the other 
first adopters -- but not the later adopters). This is why we were 
very careful to find an original version of this Smalltalk, in which 
the provenance is completely clear and unambiguous, to bootstrap 
Squeak from. And this is also why we were careful to have Apple grant 
a much more free license than (say) GPL (which actually puts really 
stupid restrictions on what others do with the code). I think this 
has all worked out well.

While all of you are wasting (er, spending) a lot of time on this, it 
might be good to realize that the definitive definitions, suits, 
court cases, and actual laws are all really yet to happen. Given the 
high level of greed and low levels of perspective and intelligence of 
many of the players here, we should hope that all this is delayed as 
long as possible. The chance of actual logic, insight and forward 
thinking having much force here is nil.

As I said once before: at this point, we need better lines of code 
more than better lines of license! However, I think there are a few 
things in SqueakL -- the Apple license (the only one that obtains in 
my opinion) -- that could be removed to make it smaller and simpler, 
and this might be possible to do.

Cheers,

Alan

At 11:56 AM -0400 8/19/03, Lex Spoon wrote:
>"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
>>  Hi G–ran,
>>
>>  > Again, and I am getting somewhat tired to repeat this: I am
>>  > not talking about the Right or Wrong of the two licenses
>>  > involved here. I am talking about the very fact that we
>>  > have TWO licenses currently.
>>
>>  Okay, fine. So you talk about the fact. But what's your problem with it? It
>>  seems to me that you haven't made it quite clear as to what your concerns
>  > are. (of course, I am assuming that you _do_ have a problem with it or else
>>  I think you wouldn't talk about it in such length; if you are merely
>>  rambling please let me know ;-)
>
>It bothers me, too.  Having multiple licenses makes things more
>complicated.  If Squeak-L is okay for VM's, then let's lobby for all the
>VM's to be put under it.  If there needs to be something more for VM's,
>then let's at least use the *same* Squeak-VM-L for all VM's to use.
>
>And besides that, we *definitely*  need to have accurate descriptions on
>the download pages.  I hadn't thought about this before, but it's true.
>For people who do worry about obeying the law, it is important to know
>what licenses are involved.
>
>
>Lex


-- 



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list