[ANN] Closure Compiler

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Wed Mar 26 11:05:07 UTC 2003


On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 08:51, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
> Could a group of people identify a path or multiple ones and make a 
> clear analysis?
> 
Squeak's license is irrevocable(*). So there is no risk at all that
whatever you add to it (under the SqueakL or anything more open) will
ever be void. As long as we, as a community, don't care about whether
some nits in the Squeak license makes it 'not Open Source Definition
compliant', 'not DFSG compliant', or whatever, it is for all purposes
just as free as any open source package. Which means that you can use
it, you can add to it, you can build products with it, and you don't
have to fear(*) that someone will come down on you or the community or
anyone else to take <whatever> away. That's impossible(*).

This ugly discussion creeps up *ONLY* for the following purposes:
- There are members of the community (me included) who would like (for
various reasons) to see Squeak under an OSD-compliant license.
- For this to happen, obviously the SqueakL needs to change.
- In order to make this even remotely feasible, every single contributor
would need to agree with the license change.
Obviously, this gets really really hairy if we have a multitude of
licenses in Squeak...

There's a second argument that's not related to this open source
business: Squeak (whatever that means) is distributed under the SqueakL.
So, by reading the SqueakL, you now your rights (use it for whatever you
like, don't sue us) and obligations (share some modifications, don't
give it to people living in Libya). If Squeak, as you get it, would
contain code under various licenses, you'd need to study all the
licenses and it would make it less easy for you to evalutate whether
Squeak is usable by you.

A third argument is that some licenses have viral qualities - if you
combine code under two licenses, one license may state that 'the other
code' comes under its terms. The GPL is a clear example of this: if you
link any code to GPL-licensed code, the GPL states that the resulting
whole counts as a derived work and therefore must be licensed under the
GPL. This is good if your political agenda is called 'copyleft' - in
effect, they are founding a protected commons - but bad if your agenda
is 'I do not care about political agendas'. Other licenses may have
similar terms; for example, the SqueakL stating that everything you
modify of Squeak (as you received it) should be shared with the
community is viral: if you file-in code that has modifications to, say,
Object>>asString, the modification *must* be shared with the community
under the SqueakL (only if you redistribute or sublicense it - read the
SqueakL for the gory details). Obviously, every additional license
inside Squeak creates a risk of 'contamination', and this is a
combinatorial explosion you want to avoid.

So, there are good reasons to try to keep at least the basics ('kernel',
'coder', maybe even 'carnival') clean (SqueakL-code only).

What I'm arguing here, and what caused this whole discussion it seems
;-), is that there are alternative licenses that are strict supersets of
the SqueakL(*). There is also public domain code - code, where the
original owner has relinguished all rights (including the copyright) to
the work and everyone is free to do as they please with the work. Code
under these licenses (I think even refactory.com's 'click here to
download the Refactoring Browser' constitutes a license - they keep the
copyright by default, so they must grant some rights based on this
privilege by offering copyrighted works for download; a safe assumption
is that the BSD/MIT terms apply: use as you like, don't sue us), being
supersets of the SqueakL in terms of granting you at least all the
rights of the SqueakL and not burdening you with more obligations, could
be considered for inclusion into Squeak. 

I'm not saying that, therefore, this code should be willy-nilly included
into Squeak. Of course, it is preferable to go to the author, explain (a
Swiki page might be in order) this whole thing here and discuss the
issue of dual licensing; however, *iff* the author refuses to do so and
*iff* the code is deemed important enough, I would vote in favor of
nevertheless including the stuff. 

Short summary: please keep contributing, Stef :-)

(*) I'm talking in absolutes here. To satisfy Andrew: nothing is
absolute in Law. If Apple and/or Disney or whoever feels like it, they
can sue you for not walking on the right side of the road. So there are
no absolutes, I'm just making up a model of reality here in order to be
able to discuss this whole thing without too many subsentences, OK?
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