Contributors Agreement signature status?

Craig Latta craig at netjam.org
Tue Jul 3 20:36:30 UTC 2007


Hi Pavel--

> Hi all,
>
> what is the Contributors Agreement signature status of this people
> (84)?

     I suspect you're aware that I'm coordinating that information. :)
As always, it's available at [1] (from which you seem to have copied
your initials/name info, as indicated by the "nee Hultgren" annotation
of mine :).

> bootstrap    Pavel Krivanek

     We have a signed letter on file for you (reflected in [1]). As for
the rest of the 84 people you asked about, all of them have signed
except for:

     Andrew C. Greenberg (acg)
     Alain Fischer (AFi)
     Brent Pinkney (brp)
     Ben Schroeder (bvs)
     David J. Pennell (djp)
     Dwight Hughes (dwh)
     Henrik Gedenryd [deceased] (hg)
     Helge Horch (hh)
     ? (jm)
     Mike Rutenberg (mdr)
     ? (pmm)
     Paul McDonough (pnm)
     Richard A. Harmon (RAH)
     John Sarkela (reThink)
     Ranjan Bagchi (RJ)
     Stefan Matthias Aust (sma)
     Travis Griggs (TAG)
     The Fourth Estate, Inc. (tfei)
     ? (to)
     Wayne Braun (wb)

     As mentioned here previously (complete with ensuing mail storms :),
the board has authorized current and future Squeak release teams to
discard the code of non-signers at their discretion, as of 1 May 2007.
Of course, as a practical matter, this isn't a big deal right now, since
the current release team hasn't discarded anything for this reason yet,
as far as I know.

     The information at [1] includes the Squeak 3.9 objects I use to
store this information. I generated all the textual lists at [1], as
well as the list above, by evaluating expressions with those objects.
Anyone could easily do the same, and I have mentioned all this here
before on multiple occasions. I'm sorry to be repetitive, but it seems
diligent to point this stuff out again. :)

> that are the authors of methods that are contained in the smallest
> image that is able to load the rest of Squeak.

     I'm still puzzled as to why you feel the need to duplicate the
Spoon work (and then use false superlatives to describe the result).
What's going on here?

> We are talking about cca 2500 methods where about 650 methods have no
> time stamp. I expect that it means that the authors of this methods
> relinquished the authorship so this method are automatically under the
> new Squeak license.

     I don't think there's any basis to assume that. Under the Berne
convention, an author need not register a copyright in the countries
that adhere to the convention. This is one reason why we're collecting
explicit agreements. I assure you, if we didn't feel we ought to go
through this, we wouldn't. :)

> I think that the set of methods that we will have to rewrite will be
> very low.

     Yes, and much lower still with Spoon.

> If we will confirm license change for methods by this authors, we will
> have the first image, that can be able to:
> - load reset of non-free kernel methods
> - load fonts, display text and paragraph support
> - load MinimalMorphic system
> - load rest of Squeak code
> This steps can be done explicitly by user (he for example runs a
> script that will download and install the code from internet) so the
> basic kernel Squeak image will be freely redistributable. Currently
> the basic kernel includes only Linux platform dependent code.
> If we will have this image free, we can slowly add the next
> license-clean code to the kernel.

     This is roughly the plan for Naiad, Spoon's module system.

     I'm mostly a technocrat: I want to put my effort into the
technology I think is most effective. Do you have a similar mindset? Is
there something about Spoon that you think is lacking? Are we dealing
with technical issues, or political ones, or something else? It's not
clear to me why, apparently, we're working at cross purposes.


     thanks!

-C

[1] http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]




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