On 5/9/05, Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> Under this logic, if I took squeak, stripped off the license, and
> posted the remainder, perhaps with my own license, you'd be home
> free.  This is a rather dubious interpretation.
>
Well... I figure that at this point there's a sound legal system
around theft of property, receipt in good faith of stolen goods,
etcetera, in most parts of the world. I would have to give up my
'license' which doesn't turn out to be a license, but if all is done
in good faith by the recipient of said license I don't see how he/she
would be liable for damages, etcetera.

(please don't make the point that therefore if I'd accept the VRI
license, knowing about SqueakL, I'm not acting in good faith - I know
that. Where I use 'I' in these circumstances, please substitute by
'Jane Doe').
 
> I also don't think it's helpful to call people who take licenses
> seriously names.  Maybe that's because I'm one of them.
>
I was calling people names who take licenses so seriously that they
refuse a conference entry based on that. That is taking licenses so
awfully seriously, that my only reaction can be nonsensical.
"bean-counting wankers" was the best I could come up with.

However, I do appreciate that if I were to write, say,  the next
trading system for the Nasdaq in Squeak, licensing would be of some
importance. All I'm trying to do is to put things into perspective -
for the overwhelming majority of projects SqueakL is just fine, it
just limits expansion, mostly into the territories of said wankers.

If anything (as far as I'm concerned, IANAL, etcetera) a license
change is a marketing gimmick.

But being interested in IP (both the sense and nonsense of it) and
licensing in general (without losing perspective of its importance), I
am very interested in the implications of VRI's liberal license on
Squeak. Which is the main point I'm bringing this up and being so
obnoxious about it.
 
(if only so we could close this never-ending discussion. Yeah, sure...). 

> So removing the fonts is not a cure-all.
> 
A conditio sine qua non, at best (probably not even that, at least in
the US, given the clear case law around bitmap fonts).

 Of course, sublicensing/relicensing is always a matter of legal risk,
and in law there are no absolutes (count on them lawyers to keep
themselves occupied...). And I'm not going to start, even, about all
the substantial contributions which are copyrightable works in their
own right. There is something to say for me having had to fax my
signature to the FSF back when I contributed bits to GCC...

>  In either case, I think you have to try to honor the wishes of the creator.
> 
The problem, of course, is that you have to read the wishes of the
creator through a dense forest of legalese. There seems to be some law
of thermodynamics at work here, because the formation of wishes into
legal terms by lawyers is essentially a non-reversible process...