Alan Kay wrote:

> 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.


I think a simplified license would be a good thing...particularly if it 
will make it acceptable to those entities that have taken it upon 
themselves to bless licenses as "open source" (as I understand it, 
SqueakL doesn't pass muster with them).  The other thing I wouldn't mind 
is if there was some entity (i.e. SqF) that did a little more to ensure 
that we (as contributors) have agreed to the terms of the Squeak 
community when submitting code for inclusion within Squeak (and 
optionally for code distributed separately).  Specifically, we would all 
grant SqF the right to redistribute and sublicense our contributions 
without restriction.  The Apache foundation has something like this: 

  http://incubator.apache.org/forms/ASF_Contributor_License_2_form.pdf

There are entities (ahem...companies) that will reject open source 
software out of hand...nothing to be done about those entities.  But, 
there are others that want any open source that they use to meet certain 
criteria wrt IP...such as ownership rights being clearly understood and 
the license not having bizarre use restrictions (i.e. GPL).  For those 
companies, the most important thing may be that there is some entity 
that assumes the responsibility (and perhaps even the liability) of 
ensuring (and assuring) that the software they distribute is free from 
IP related legal entanglements.

While I can say that I personally am not really concerned about such 
companies, I can say that I wouldn't mind there being such a framework 
for contributions in place for the Squeak community.  Such a framework 
would also be useful for various sub-projects related to Squeak, but not 
part of Squeak itself per se (also very much like the various Apache 
sub-projects).

- Stephen



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