[squeak-dev] Contributor agreement

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Tue Sep 23 23:08:14 UTC 2014


On 23-09-2014, at 3:56 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
> PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
> in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
> friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
> deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
> Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
> they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
> resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
> a product.

I *think* Apple got a slightly different deal and in fact HP etc were restricted rather more.

> 
> Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
> terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
> workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406).

Don’t forget the 4405 and 4409!

[snippety-snip]

> One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
> Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions.

He later changed all that to what looks rather like an MIT license to me; the only restriction is you have to include the license header in any copy of the file and accept that there is no warranty of any sort. See 
http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/squeak/trunk/platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixExternalPrims.c?view=markup for example. I used the same boilerplate for my RISC OS files. The win32 & Mac files appear to have no relevant text.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- One clown short of a circus.




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