stéphane:

1. Hernan Wilkinson: No fair pointing me at Hernan's work when a Google
search turns up nothing--especially since there's no way I can travel from
California to Europe any time soon.  So tell me more.

2. The Chronos License: In case no one's noticed, the current version of the
license also forbids any commercial use.  Of course, I'll be removing that
restriction once I've completed the documentation, implemented leap seconds,
and completed a final beta period.  ETA of Release 1.0 is no later than the
end of the year (hey, I have a full time job that doesn't involve Smalltalk
coding.)

When Release 1.0 is published, I will be revising the license.  The revision
will certainly remove the restriction against commercial use, but there's no
reason I couldn't make other changes also at that time, should I become
convinced that I should do so.  What I'm trying to say is that there's time
for those of you who strongly object to the "no porting outside of
Smalltalk" clause to convince me to change my mind.

However, at this point I've heard from exactly four people who possibly
object. One of them recently wrote me for permission to port to a particular
non-Smalltalk programming language--which I have granted in writing (the
letter's in the mail as of today.) Whether that addresses his objection or
not he hasn't said.  I'm counting Howard Stearns as one of the four,
although all he said was  "You may have trademark issues in addition to the
license controversy," which doesn't actually make his opinion on the matter
explicit.  So perhaps there are only two people who object: Andreas Raab and
Stéphane Ducasse.

Nevertheless, I feel the objections raise significant issues that deserve
further discussion--and I don't mean just in the context of Chronos. The
issues are much larger than that.  I don't want any such discussion to focus
on Chronos per se--partly because it deserves to be a generic discussion,
and partly because I'm really trying to avoid overly publicizing Chronos at
this time (it's not done yet.) At this time, I'd prefer that Chronos only be
seriously used by those for whom date/time computations are of high
interest--and even then, only for purposes of evaluation. That's why my
initial post said it was a "low key announcement."

So, given the subject of this thread, I'm going to close without saying
anything further right now, but will post a new topic where the general
licensing issues can be discussed (although not today--I have other business
that must be attended to.)  Of course, others are welcome to start such a
topic on their own, should they be so inclined.

--Alan


-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of stéphane
ducasse
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 2:10 AM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Re: Chronos

But alan

why do not you provide it as MIT and you can still port it to Java
and sell it? I know that this is naive but
when I see the hell of the licenses around and got systematically
bitten by it.
I think that in squeak we should have MIT and Squeak-L: look at
Squeaksource, smallwiki, seaside, croquet, tweak.....
the new network rewrite, compiler....will all be like that. Else I
think that people should not really use your package.

By the way you will be interested by the forthcoming talk at esug
about another time package developed by hernan wilkinson.
It seems that their package will be open too, so may be it would be
good to see how to produce the best of your packages.
Or at least have a look.

Stef

On 20 juil. 05, at 4:05, Alan Lovejoy wrote:

>
>
> Brian Rice [water at tunes.org] napical:
>
>> Eek! That means I can't port it to Slate (http://slate.tunes.org/).
>> What's the point of that?
>>
>
>
>> On Jul 19, 2005, at 5:06 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
>>
>
>
>> Looks interesting, but I sure hope you'll get your licensing terms
>> in order. In particular this:
>>
>>     "4. You must agree not to port or translate Chronos into any
>> programming language whose syntax, semantics and computational
>> model are not substantially compliant to the ANSI Smalltalk
>> Language Specification.  Porting Chronos to non-Smalltalk
>> programming languages is strictly prohibited.  However, you are
>> welcome to enter into negotiations with the copyright owner for
>> permission to port Chronos to non-Smalltalk programming languages.
>> In some cases, permission may be granted at no cost or other
>> encumberance."
>>
>> Unless you are trying to find out whether anyone actually reads the
>> license (in which case you've earned yourself a pat on the back for
>> adding a really creative little clause to your license ;-) I think
>> you should seriously rethink the attitude express by this clause.
>> Surely you realize that niche languages like Smalltalk would be
>> hurt more than other systems if everybody would pick up this
>> attitude and have do-not-port-to-languages-i-don't-like clauses.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   - Andreas
>>
>
> Calm down guys.
>
> Firstly, permit me to call your attention to the following two
> sentences of
> the license:
>
> "However, you are welcome to enter into negotiations with the
> copyright
> owner for  permission to port Chronos to non-Smalltalk programming
> languages.  In some cases, permission may be granted at no cost or
> other
> encumberance."
>
> Of course, the license says nothing that specifies the basis on
> which I
> would decide whether or not to grant permission to port.  So let me
> state it
> here:  Although Andreas is partially correct that one of my
> motivations is
> to deny the functionality of Chronos to be ported to certain other
> languages
> because of my partisan dislike of the languages preferred by the
> Curly-Braced Horde, that's not the primary motivation.  The primary
> motivation is money.  I want to preserve my right to port Chronos to a
> widely-used language (e.g., Java) and sell it for money.  That
> motivation is
> not operative in the case of languages such as Slate, Self or
> Haskell, and
> so I would grant permission for a port to such languages without
> hesitation.
>
> However, because I want to be able to say that no one has
> permission to port
> who was not given such permission in writing, you must obtain written
> permission.  If Brian is serious about porting Chronos to Slate, he
> should
> send me his contact details, and I will send him porting permission in
> writing.
>
> --Alan
>
>
>
>
>