[ANN] Closure Compiler

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at netvision.net.il
Thu Mar 27 15:32:55 UTC 2003


goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> Now, for something completely different, possibly changing Squeak-L.
> First of all, when Daniel wrote:
> > Since what I wish for Squeak is acceptance in the community of free
> > software and open source, I think the important issue is DFSG and 
> > Debian
> > acceptance, not OSI acceptance.
> 
> Daniel's use of the word "free" was probably not intended to imply that
> we should move towards GPL. I assume. :-) I actually think almost all of
> us wants to move towards MIT/BSD and NOT GPL. BSD/MIT are all "accepted"
> in the "community of free software" AFAIK.

Exactly right. I agree the GPL is a brown gooy smelly license, as far as
Smalltalk code is concerned (as an aside - The FSF agrees. GNU
Smalltalks Smalltalk portion isn't GPLed either). I want a free license,
as defined almost identically by FSF, Debian, and OSI, but specifically
as interpreted by Debian. 

The reason among the three I prefer the second is that between "Fighting
the good fight", "Sharing the good stuff with our friends" and "letting
big companies play the game and breath easy", this community cares most
about the second. The third would be a compromise, slightly better than
the current situation, but still not very good.

> Secondly I interpreted your postings to mean that it is "smarter" to
> first check with Apple to get the license changed instead of crafting a
> sublicense and try running with it, even if it is a possibility. :-)
> Right?
I personally am far more concerned with the communities interpretation
of "smart" than with the courts. And Debian does include openMosix,
which was GPLed under strained conditions, and not it's predecessor,
that has an unclear, but well accepted license. But as Andrew says, this
is tactics. We should focus on creating concensus, first.

Daniel



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