[ANN] Territorial

GPL is a license that courts have already recognized in many cases.

Not that they have much of a choice

A license is basically a contract and contracts are legally binding as long as acceptance can be proved for both sides.

As a lawyer I would not advise any client to try to challenge GPL on two grounds:

a) Infringement of contract makes you liable to compensation and gives the legal right to the other party to have a court decisions  that forbids you to keep selling / distributing your software. If you violate the court decision that entitles the opposing party for further litigation and compensation. In some cases comes with the gift of prison time depending on national law

b) Its also an infringement on copyright which is even more litigation and much more compensations

Also from a practical point of view GPL is the only license that can really protect open source software on the premise when you have a permitting license like MIT what you do is open the door to countless of companies that want to do business with you for selling their closed source but also countless of threats. A company could easily for example take Pharo close source it and heavily upgrade , as a result many Pharo users could migrate to this heavily improved new close source Pharo essentially killing or shrinking substantially the MIT Pharo. This is actually what Pharo did for Squeak with the big difference that Pharo is still open source.

Of course MIT license is what most companies would prefer for using your code , though LGPL is also a favored choice. You can also have modified GPL license that allows its usage on closed source system which is basically what LGPL is , but with the difference you can put any term you want in it. Most popular languages come with their own license anyway.

If what you claimed was true even slightly that would mean that the law would not protect GPL, which in extension would mean no protection for licenses which in extension would mean no protection for contracts which as you can imagine is just not practical and would through the entire global commerce into a chaos, legal or non legal.

In case of Europe things are better on the legal protection front because EU law has done an excellent job at harmonizing national legislation and protecting basic legal rights.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 10:27 AM stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Le 7/9/16 à 08:53, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas a écrit :

Hi,

Nice to see more diversity on license choice and projects in this community. We have the permissive MIT license by default in almost all Pharo and related project, but seeing GPL and AGPL in projects like Spec and now Territorial increase the sense of choice and engagement.

No sorry I cannot let you say such stupid statement.
Spec is not GPL. And GPL is really dangerous for image based system. It is a plague.

We do not want to force nice people (the one that could follow a license) to have to decide to use another language
just because they do not want to give their work for free.
Open source

Second you do not know what the mess it can be.

In my case as a freelancer, having such licenses as base for the code of my works has helped me against big institutions that have aggressive practices regarding "Intelectual Property" and want everything for them all the time. Even in this community we have seen some interesting work that can not be contributed back to the community until the community makes something open by default (something related Java support comes to mind).

You do not know the story behind. And all Moose is BSD and Pharo ecosystem is MIT. So you can run away with them and get rich.
Now none of them force people to open source what they are doing

Having a license that enforce reciprocity by default (GPL, AGPL) instead of "do what you want" ones (MIT, BSD) helps to keep the commons protected against predatory enclosure,

No it does not protect anything. It binds nice people to act nicely but does not do anything against assholes. So this is a lose / lose situation.

even if you're a small freelancer and the ones really interested in such enclosure can still contact the author and pay the extra price that comes with not reciprocity to the wider community.

You dream. Such license will not protect anyone.
There are millions companies out there using GPL code and not opening their work.
Any code in GPL will not be considered for anything in our community.

Thanks Hernán,

Offray 

On 07/09/16 06:48, [hidden email] wrote:

In Tiki, there has been such discussions as well.

https://tiki.org/License

But yeah, MIT license is the best thing :-)

Phil

On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 12:25 AM, Hernán Morales Durand <[hidden email]> wrote:

I thought for a while about the license.

Fixing the ASP loophole means trying to escape from companies using a trick to avoid returning changes to the code back to the community[1]. I agree with such position. GNU AGPL is free, copyleft, approved by OSI, FSF, and used by successful projects : MongoDB, SugarCRM, OTRS, etc. If anyone want to discuss collaboration or re-licensing, for example to monetize library services, feel free to contact me privately.

Hernán

[1] http://www.fabcapo.com/2008/02/we-have-submitted-agpl-to-osi.html

2016-09-06 18:03 GMT-03:00 Tudor Girba <[hidden email]>:

Hi Hernán,

I believe Stef was asking about the choice of picking a viral license vs the permissive MIT one that we use in code that gets into Pharo (and several other larger related projects).

Cheers,
Doru

> On Sep 6, 2016, at 10:28 PM, Hernán Morales Durand <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi Stef,
>
> I used the License Differentiator tool at http://oss-watch.ac.uk/apps/licdiff/
>
> I like it because it fixes the 'ASP (application service provider) loophole' or 'privacy loophole' problem (See Choice Six in the tool)
>
> Hernán
>
>
> 2016-09-06 16:47 GMT-03:00 stepharo <[hidden email]>:
> Hi hernan
>
> why do you picked AGPL? We try to protect our community against license hell.
> Stef
> Le 6/9/16 à 11:40, Hernán Morales Durand a écrit :
>>
>> Hi Stephan,
>>
>> 2016-09-06 2:52 GMT-03:00 Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]>:
>> On 06/09/16 06:24, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
>>
>> I am happy to announce the release of Territorial, a new Smalltalk
>> library for Geographical Information Retrieval in geopolitical objects.
>>
>> Nice. Please tell us about your license choice
>>
>>
>> License of the library is AGPL v3 (it is in the Notes and disclaimers of the manual)
>> License of the documentation is CC BY-SA 3.0
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Hernán
>>
>> Stephan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

--
www.tudorgirba.com
www.feenk.com

"If you can't say why something is relevant,
it probably isn't."

About my tone may I ask a question? Yes sometimes I feel irritated. I'm human and I feel irritated.

May be you know the trick that some smart manager use to control the length of meetings...

I experienced in our team in the past meetings with 18 people and one guy was always talking a lot more than others. And I was always asking myself: does it have conscience that each minute he is taking is in fact 18 min because we could all spend 1 min doing something else.

After that I heard about team that have strange clock where the clock is multiplying by the amount of participants.

So when I participate to meetings I always think about what is the value that I bring to other time.

Now we are all busy, you see some people in our team and outside told me that they do not have the time to follow Pharo mailing-lists because there are too many emails. And we all lose because the insights of such people could be really great.

So some alternatives:

    - do not care do not read the pharo mailing-list, I would not feel happy with such solution.

    - be forced to react when something wrong is said because this is important for everybody. And yes sometimes I'm irritated because I feel forced to say something.I have the impression that not saying anything is a kind of luxury that I do not have.

    - have a closed contributors only mailing-list (not good does not feel nice).

This license point is key and this is why I reacted. And I reacted that way because I CARE about our system and I CARE about our communitee.

Out there, there is Java, Lua, Python, Ruby, Swift, Objective-C and many more. So we should pay attention to our ecosystem and the license

is an integral part of it.

So sorry to be rude but I'm ***REALLY*** busy. Much more than you can imagine. Even more. And I feel responsible.

Stef

Ironically enough "this is our way , take it or leave it" would not work for Pharo because its smalltalk and basically smalltalk by architecture allow you to deeply modify the system from the get go.

This make Pharo technically impossible to control from a dictator and committee point of view like lets say Python or Linux. CPython is a single implementation , but with pharo every pharo app is essentially a new pharo implementation.  The moment you modify or extend the pharo image you make a new pharo implementation.

I don't like the tone Stef is expressing , he is quite rude and definitely does not represent the tone of the community which far more open to dialogue but he is correct , GPL would never have worked for Pharo. Actually I dont think I have seen a language that is fairly popular under a GPL license.

There is of course software under GPL which is sucessful commercially, Blender is an example, but GPL does not cover 3d assets, music and sound. In that case you use another kind of license like creative commons or heavily modify GPL to extend beyond code. So it was definitely not GPL that made Blender popular, actually it caused a problem with game developers because games using the BGE (Blender Game Engine) were at first considered data because the code was packaged inside the blend file which had a binary format so that meant it was not covered by GPL because it considered the whole game code just data (there is a separate executable for loading the game code)  but then Blender decided to change this also to GPL with extending its license and that pretty much killed commercial games made with Blender.

So technically you could get away with GPLing Pharo because you could argue that Pharo image is merely data that the VM loads and not real source code, which is kinda correct but it would be messy and the legal interpretation very confusing and uncertain ( leaves a lot of room for legal interpretation ) . As a company you cannot risk this , especially while you expect to make big profit.

As stef said GPL is like a virus, it spread anywhere it touches. Even if all you do is add a tiny bit of GPL code inside the Pharo image would turn the entire Pharo implementation including the VM into GPL and because Pharo tries to approach as many companies as possible as most other languages do , because money helps improve the popularity and the quality of the code, MIT is definitely the way to do.

So its more a "have to" than a "must to".

Also double license or not its kinda pointless, the moment something becomes MIT you can be rest assured that people will pick MIT over GPL. This because you can turn MIT to GPL but you cannot turn GPL to MIT. So even if you want your project GPLed , MIT is still more than enough and of course most people will pick MIT for commercial apps so they don't need to open source their code.

So no, it does not matter that Spec is double licensed , or if it is legal that is double licensed , since its active implementation is MIT this all you need to know.

So for Pharo and pretty much almost all other programming languages out there who aspire to be used by as many people as possible and play an active role in the software market MIT like license is a mandatory choice. The irony of people not wanting to open source their code but wanting to use open source code. Its this type of thinking that justifies the existence of GPL.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 2:59 PM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,


On 07/09/16 13:39, stepharo wrote:
>
>> We should not have "The Pharo Way" (TM) or "No way!"... suddenly
>> Markus talk about feedback loops comes to mind, particularly the
>> slide on page 53, regarding "An open source smalltalk ignoring all
>> community contributions"[2]. This is far for being the case in this
>> community and we can keep that scenario at safe distance, if we show
>> options. So, dual license is an option, git is an option, markdown is
>> an option. Pharo as a place with options is one where Pharo can
>> fulfill its vision for more people. Let's make these options visible
>> and figure out the way the work better for a wider community.
> It is amazing how you like talking.
>

Yes. I like. Is the way to know unwritten history. Not all the people in
the community know the details as you do, so talking is the way of going
out of misconceptions, like mine about dual license or state positions,
like why I don't use Pillar. The "it has been discussed, this is our
way, take or leave it" doesn't help in understanding way. So yes, I'm
all about encouraging dialog/talk if it helps to understand.

Bye,

Offray