On Wednesday 26 March 2003 12:28 am, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> I think the following pillars are important for the discussion:
>
> 1. SM should allow packages under different licenses. Right?
> 2. Distros will be practically possible with SM1.1 using load
> scripts.
>
> Obviously the "load script maker" will need to take care what
> licenses the included packages are under - at least as a service to
> the users of the load script. A load script is just an automated
> way of installing packages from SM. It is not a distributed image.

I thought Andrew was warning against having conflicting licenses 
*anywhere* in SM (especially GPL).

He had talked to RMS who thought that our situation was more like 
using library routines than loading programs into an operating system 
(and therefore loading a SM package that was under the GPL would 
infect all of Squeak).

This is what Andrew said yesterday:
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Be careful about the suggestion that we can survive well with a 
Squeak-L main distro and various distributions under other licenses.   
This probably (almost certainly) isn't so.

Some licenses (Squeak-L and GPL, for example) do not mix, and using 
one 
licenses for a distro and another for distributed code, however 
comforting it may make one feel "technically speaking," is legally a 
recipe for disaster.  While some of my lay colleagues on this list 
disagree with me on this point, I can only suggest that a Squeakmap 
comprising incompatible licenses distributed for inclusion in the 
monolithinc image is a killer problem.

We have looked into this before, tried to negotiate with FSF for a 
compromise, and it is presently their position that loading code into 
our image is NOT legally equivalent under GPL to loading an 
application 
onto a computer with an operating system -- indeed, he goes further, 
considering it to be the same as merging libraries into a single app.  
I have spoken with RMS on this myself, and he is not sanguine about 
letting things lie -- he doesn't want images to be mixed unless they 
are all GPL, and he considers the entire image to be GPL'd by the 
loading of a GPL package into the image.  (He feels similarly about 
programs using GPL'd dynamic libraries on an operating system with 
applications not GPL'd, by the way.)
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-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
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