Squeak License OSD-compliance
Zooko
zooko at zooko.com
Wed Feb 27 21:21:18 UTC 2002
Go"ran:
Thank you for the reply. I still feel that we are misunderstanding each other
in some part.
You wrote:
>
> No, I think Cees understood (this question has been hammered to death on the Squeak list) but he
> might have expressed himself a bit unclear.
>
> The problem we are facing is that even if the community would like to go for a BSD/MIT like
> license (which would be GPL compatible) we do not have the final word here. Apple is in charge
> (being the owner of a large, but hard to define, part of the core).
Ah yes. I see that this could be a problem with adopting a GPL-compatible
license.
> We are (as far as I know)
> approaching Apple with the proposal that:
>
> 1. They transfer the license to Squeak Foundation. But that is probably not going to happen. If it
> happens we would probably make a new license (BSD/MIT whatever) which would work with GPL. Note
> though further below on that.
That makes sense to me.
> 2. If they don't agree with the above, they change the license to APSL which (I assume) is not GPL
> compatible. Or at least recraft SqueakL to be "like" APSL in the questionable clauses.
I don't know anything about APSL, but looking at the FSF's license list [1],
I agree with you that APSL is not GPL compatible.
> And finally - there are still special problems with an image-based language/environment like
> Squeak/Smalltalk when it comes to GPL - linking is too vaguely defined. We have a very good IP
> lawyer that has spoken with Mr Stallman about that problem but according to him (Andrew Greenberg)
> Mr Stallman wasn't interested in the problem.
This is the part where I get confused. How can the meaning of "linking" with
regard to multimedia files affect the license's GPL-compatibility?
Ah! I think I see now. You might for example release Squeak with a license
which is itself GPL compatible, but you might also include media data with
Squeak which is not licensed freely, and then the whole Squeak package might be
GPL-incompatible. Is that what you mean?
Regards,
Zooko
[1] http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html
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zooko.com
Security and Distributed Systems Engineering
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