On 3-Feb-08, at 4:07 AM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

> Until then, *DO NOT LOOK AT GST*

Gimme a break. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression.

Have you ever seen a Hollywood remake of a foreign film? They can do  
that because the ideas in a film are not protected by copyright, only  
the actual footage. Closer to home, SCO's lawsuit against IBM is dead  
in the water, in large part because they couldn't identify actual  
source code that had been copied from Unix to Linux and were just  
handwaving about "methods and concepts."

The famous "clean room" technique that Phoenix used to reverse  
engineer IBM's PC BIOS is a pretty rare case. Smalltalk has a lot more  
design latitude than a BIOS, and there aren't billions of dollars at  
stake.

I'm all for having Squeak on a solid legal and licensing foundation.  
I'm really happy to see the relicensing effort proceeding well, and I  
think it will be great for Squeak to have stronger ties to the larger  
open source and free software movements. But refusing to examine the  
source code of other Smalltalks is just silly.

Colin