Hi Jecel,

Thanks for the history and all your efforts.

Lou


On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:56:16 -0300, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr."
<jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:

>David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
>> The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
>> the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
>> else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
>> image up to that point.
>
>Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
>have joined us more recently:
>
>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.
>
>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). They also used
>Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
>from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
>with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.
>
>Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
>later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
>was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
>started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
>license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
>Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
>do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
>from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
>strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
>friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
>distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
>contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
>whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
>extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.
>
>The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
>way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
>yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
>though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
>considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
>bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
>fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
>restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
>them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
>your distributing Squeak.
>
>Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
>project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
>Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
>Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
>OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
>Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
>people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
>everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
>to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
>the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
>wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
>Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
>checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
>programmer initials).
>
>One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
>Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
>and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
>problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
>available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
>Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
>future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
>other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
>available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
>but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
>you all with these details.
>
>-- Jecel
>
>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:Lou at Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com