Ken Causey wrote:
> Let me state my concerns another way as it seems I'm not being clear.
> 
> My concern is for the unknown person or entity some years from now who
> is considering adopting Squeak and sees something about the license
> history and has to have some basis for justifying that they have no
> reasonable fear of legal repercussions.
> 
> It seems to me that whatever we decide we have to clearly fully document
> this for years to come.
> 
> To make this more concrete it seems to me that the very first customer
> we have to please is the Software Freedom Law Center.  Do they not have
> some sort of formal policy on this?  If not, shouldn't they want to work
> with us to develop one?  This seems like a fundamental starting point at
> the very least.


This might be a nutty idea but...

What if the code that finds the methods that are badly licensed and that 
we have no means of relicensing with a better license is simply removed 
by the finding code. Then the development teams or whomever is using the 
development version fixes this in the debugger when code is run that 
uses the missing methods.

This way there is nobody looking at implementations to write tests or 
documentation. The code is mechanically removed, no implementation 
details revealed other than an understanding of what the calling code is 
expecting.

That makes it as clean a break from the past as is possible. It will 
never be demonstrable that an implementer did not peak in an earlier 
image. But we will have done all that could be done to do this cleanly 
with integrity to the process. That is all we can ask or do.

Don't know if this helps. But I did want to toss it out there in the 
arena of ideas. :)

Jimmie