[squeak-dev] Content licenses (was: The Inbox: Tools-ct.940.mcz)

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sat Feb 15 22:04:35 UTC 2020



> On 2020-02-15, at 12:53 PM, Jakob Reschke <forums.jakob at resfarm.de> wrote:
> 
> I don't believe that anyone who has contributed to Squeak in the past
> decade will suddenly sue. I won't :-)
> But I agree with Christoph, how are you supposed to know the implicit
> contributors license agreement on a page you never actually have to
> visit?
> It might be a risk, and I wanted to point that out.

Well, let's consider the path to contributing code to mainline Squeak. Clearly, anyone able to commit to the trunk will know and understand the MIT license rule. Is this so for the inbox? I suppose it is possible that someone could find Squeak, read a lot, develop some code to contribute, work out that committing to inbox is a good start and somehow manage to avoid spotting the MIT requirement. There isn't any mechanism for setting any other license as part of the commit, so they would have to try some sort of comment based "this code is under the Dentrazi-Gouald Compact Standard Military License. Violators will be dropped into a convenient black hole" approach - and I rather suspect we'd notice that when it got checked over for moving to Trunk. At least I hope so...

New projects should not be any worry because after all, to make a project on squeaksource etc you need to sign up and create a project page and that definitely involves choosing the license for it.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: LCD: Launch Cartridge Disk




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