If python goes Etoys, let's go scripting then - with the best IDE for creating and a clean license for running(!) scripts

Markus Gaelli gaelli at emergent.de
Wed Aug 23 06:27:14 UTC 2006


Dear squeak masters and friends,

Professor Nierstrasz (liking the IDE of Squeak and Smalltalk a lot,  
but starting to build Ruby scripts for convenience (#!) reasons)  
asked Marcus and me about the possibility of having Squeak as a good  
script writing engine on the one hand and a script executor on the  
other hand.

The underlying idea is simple: use a full fledged Squeak as your IDE  
but then file out your smalltalk script you created (in a more human  
readable version, thus without those "!!" and also edible in Emacs  
and friends, maybe looking like the scripts Andreas and Bert proposed  
on Squeak-dev recently) and run it on top of some minimal working  
image in a #!/usr/local/bin/squeak way. Ruby on rails will be on the  
next version of OS-X, but what does us stop to have things like  
Seaside there in the follow up?

I think currently it is the license. Especially for the stuff needed  
to run the "scripts".
Whereas I would not care for the open source kindness of the Squeak  
license, many people do...

As far as I understand the situation, a minimal working image could  
be soon made OSI-compliant using this apple open source license  
APSL2, no?
Isn't it mainly morphs on the image side? These would not be  
necessary in the minimal script, but maybe I am too "blue eyed" here  
again.

But for the VM side: Is it too naive from me to think that it is only a:

  "YES, I HEREBY DECLARE ALL MY CHANGES TO THE APSL2 LICENSED VM FROM  
SQUEAK 1.1 ALSO TO BE APSL2 LICENSED"
(please sign here ...)

from the few VM gurus (I hopefully caught here as addressees) which  
prevents us from doing so?

So please, dear VM gurus, tell me, this would be possible to  
relicense your great work of the last years to something OSI  
compliant- and then do it, - or that this has already been done, or  
that it is unnecessary for some good reason. I think changing the  
_current_ VM license to APSL2 could accelerate the rest of the  
process a lot.

Then - having this "scripting language plot" established, we might be  
able to tear some more people to the "Etoys Omniuser plot" which in  
my eyes stays the master plan of course...

And: I may be ignorant! Is there any discussion about this issue I am  
missing, or points that I see in a wrong perspective?

Cheers,

Markus

p.s. Please forgive receiving this as a doublet, but it was silly of  
me to send this only to a few people yesterday - learn sth. new every  
day... ;-)
The alternative would have been to send it to squeak-board, but now I  
opted to have the discussion (hopefully there is more action) public  
and not closed - it is about the openness of squeak in the end...




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list