Squeak License OSD-compliance

[Zooko]

 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

---
                 zooko.com
Security and Distributed Systems Engineering
---
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3