On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 11:54 AM, Alan Kay wrote:

> 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).

I'm really confused by this last bit. This is the second time in recent 
memory that someone has stated that Disney doesn't own any of the their 
contributions to Squeak. But that doesn't follow from the fact that 
they allowed them to be published. This is the point of copyright, 
after all: it exists so that an author can publish his work without 
losing control over it.

Now, if Disney has actually taken the step of abandoning their 
copyright, or of assigning it to some other party, great. But no one 
has said that this happened. Alan's point about the untestedness of 
copyright law with regard to source code is well taken, but this 
particular area of copyright law - who the copyright belongs to - is 
fairly well understood.

If we plan to take any action regarding the Squeak License, this issue 
will have to be clarified.

> 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 would like to see this happen, and I'm willing to put a fair amount 
of effort into it.

Colin