Re: squeak

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> Allowing third parties to "make money" with Squeak-based applications
> is part of the intent of the Squeak License. Any modifications to the
> base system have to be shared and thus given back to the community.
> Whatever you build on top of Squeak (using the base system as a
> development and runtime environment) can be proprietary or shared.
This is what BSD, MPL or similiar licenses was invented for ...

> Squeak is free, but not Free as the FSF defines it, both for social and
> technical reasons. The technical reasons include that Squeak is a
> dynamic, "life" object system, in contrast to most other programming
> environments who are based on "dead" source code. Terms like "source
> code", "linking", "library" etc. do not have quite the same meaning.
> This makes it hard to be compare it with the GPL.
We do not necessarily need a GPL license.

> And Open Source? Of
> course you have the source built into the life system! It is actually
> very hard to lock down the system in a way that you can not easily
> access the source code.
Well the term "Open Source" is used often for things where you are
allowed to have a look at the source, but our (Debian) definition
includes the right to change and redistribute.

Just consider the Debian Guidelines

     http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

if they would work.  What Debian gives back to Squeak is a *really*
great user base which might be helpful for your project.  This is the
extra plus and there are *many* projects who really like it to become
pupolar on the back of Debian.

> Or, to illustrate the "life system" idea a bit: Who does really run his
> whole desktop under GDB? Not many, I'd guess. You'd rather do a
> pathological examination of the core dump instead. However, in Squeak I
> do exactly this. Whenever something goes wrong, I can immediately debug
> and fix it, of course in the running system. No restart of the crashed
> application necessary. You would be surprised what difference this
> makes in your development style!
Well, I do not see any reason why this conflicts with a license which fits
the rules mentioned above.

> (*) If Disney's legal department can accept this open-source license,
> it should be farely safe to assume it will work for your company, too.
Sorry, Debian is not a company and we are simply not allowed to distribute
software which conflicts with the guidelines above.  Please have a look
at www.debian.org or perhaps

   http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/paper-cdd/debian-cdd.html/ch-about.en.html#s-debian

for an explanation of the relation to other GNU/Linux distributions.

Kind regards

          Andreas.