[Squeakfoundation]Re: Sublicensing seems possible

[goran.hultgren at bluefish.se]

Hi Ted!

Nice to hear from you! :-)

Daniel described it quite good - we are not aiming to go in the
direction of FSF (How come a lot of you guys think this? I have no idea
where this notion is coming from.) but in the "opposite direction",
which means even more BSDish than the current license.

If you haven't followed these threads, nor the thread when Squeak-L was
brought up on OSI mailinglist, there are essentially two big hurdles in
the current license: Indemnification clause, and the export clause. The
first one makes Squeak a no-no for Debian inclusion. The second one
makes it non OSI OpenSource certifiable. The font issue is not an issue
- we can easily remove those, there are enough stuff available today to
live without them.

Ted Kaehler <Ted at SqueakLand.org> wrote:
> Cees,
> 	I have no specific information on what Apple thinks, other 
> than what I heard while trying to get this license approved 7 years 
> ago.
> 	If you go to Apple asking for a change in the license, it 
> opens the whole question of why this license exists.  Apple will 
> evaluate whether or not various changes are beneficial to them.
> 	Apple cannot legally revoke the license, but they can do 
> things to "shake the tree", and put doubt into people's minds.

Well, legally they probably can revoke it but Andrew said in another
post that is is highly unlikely since that would make Apple the first
company doing such an act on an open source project. It would hurt their
goodwill a lot. Apple is doing the open source mambo these days - it
can't afford that - but that is just my guess of course, and Andrew's.

> 	If you start a company based on the current license, Apple 
> has no incentive to do anything.  I would not hesitate to start a 
> company based on the current license.  (My statements on the subject 
> don't change anything.)

Why wouldn't you hesitate that? What if we (think anyone of us in this
community) go to Apple and the scenario you just described happens? Then
that company is a dead duck. I don't follow your reasoning.

> 	Don't forget that Squeak is based on a license for Smalltalk 
> that Xerox granted to Apple.
> 	Since you have seen and worked with the Xerox and Apple code 
> inside Squeak, you can't generate parallel 'clean room' code 
> yourself.  Some stranger would have to do it.

Well, I don't know about this. Does it really need to be clean room?
Isn't that only needed when avoiding patents etc? Just guessing, again -
a lawyer interested in discussing this would be great.

regards, Göran