Squeak v4 License

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin at cableone.net
Thu Feb 24 18:23:12 UTC 2005


Hello Fellow Squeakers,

I am not attempting to revive any of the old license debates, but wanted 
to put forth a simple thought.

When we produce Squeak vX in the near future which is somewhat 
partitioned and packaged into Minimal, Basic and Mongo (or whatever :), 
that we also release it under a new Squeak Community License and 
completely drop (and drop all references to) the old Apple Squeak License.

The Croquet Project has a foundation, has attorneys. Croquet has its own 
license (MIT based) which makes no mention of Apple or the old license. 
Now deep inside the Squeak image they use, if one looks, one can find 
mention of the Apple Squeak license.

It seems to me that in this next release that we are far enough away 
from what Apple released, to free Squeak from the old license. Much has 
been redone and refactored or is completely new and different. Have we 
not bootstrapped ourselves into something different than that which was 
received?

The old Squeak was completely monolithic.

The new Squeak is modular. The basic part of Squeak is clean, refactored 
and fresh (comparitively to the Squeak received from Apple). Since 
Morphic is being cleaned an packaged, any license or ownership issues 
associated with it can be or are mitigated. And it too is or will be 
different than that which was received.

There is reasonable time and code distance from the corporate hands 
which have been on Squeak. I personally think the corporate hands don't 
care about Squeak. This change would (could) effectively dis-involve 
them completely. This could make it all a non-issue for the corporations.

Squeak vX, a clean image, fresh sources file, near empty changes file, a 
new license.  Yes...?

With such a change we could finally break into Debian, Ubuntu and 
whatever distribution desired.

Thoughts.

Jimmie Houchin





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