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Contributor agreement

Frank Shearar-3
Actually, what process do we have in place to onboard new
contributors? I know the old agreement is at
http://netjam.org/squeak/SqueakDistributionAgreement.pdf - is that
still the right document? To whom would the new contributor mail the
signed agreement? It used to be Viewpoints, but now would it be
someone in the SFC?

frank

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Re: Contributor agreement

David T. Lewis
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 09:47:48PM +0100, Frank Shearar wrote:
> Actually, what process do we have in place to onboard new
> contributors? I know the old agreement is at
> http://netjam.org/squeak/SqueakDistributionAgreement.pdf - is that
> still the right document? To whom would the new contributor mail the
> signed agreement? It used to be Viewpoints, but now would it be
> someone in the SFC?

The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
image up to that point.

Since the licensing was tidied up, we have all been able to proceed under the
current policies, which amount to making sure that all subsequent contributions
are provided under an MIT license. Every Squeak developer with trunk commit
rights has agreed to this, and we all work to the best of our ability to
ensure that both the letter and the spirit of this agreement are faithfully
preserved.

While it can sometimes seem annoying and silly, it in reality this is
critically important to preserve the integrity of the Squeak license. That
is what makes it possible for all of us to use Squeak for any personal or
commercial purpose without fear of legal problems, and it is what allows
each of us to contribute to Squeak without fear that our work will later
be lost to some silly legal dispute.

To me it is a privilege to be able to be a part of the Squeak community,
and it is worth a little bit of annoying license checking to ensure that
we will all be able to continue doing so in the years to come.

Dave

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RE: Contributor agreement

Ron Teitelbaum
> From: David T. Lewis
> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2014 8:54 PM
>
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 09:47:48PM +0100, Frank Shearar wrote:
> > Actually, what process do we have in place to onboard new
> > contributors? I know the old agreement is at
> > http://netjam.org/squeak/SqueakDistributionAgreement.pdf - is that
> > still the right document? To whom would the new contributor mail the
> > signed agreement? It used to be Viewpoints, but now would it be
> > someone in the SFC?
>
> The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
> the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
> else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
> image up to that point.
>
> Since the licensing was tidied up, we have all been able to proceed under
> the current policies, which amount to making sure that all subsequent
> contributions are provided under an MIT license. Every Squeak developer
> with trunk commit rights has agreed to this, and we all work to the best
of
> our ability to ensure that both the letter and the spirit of this
agreement
> are faithfully preserved.
>
> While it can sometimes seem annoying and silly, it in reality this is
critically
> important to preserve the integrity of the Squeak license. That is what
> makes it possible for all of us to use Squeak for any personal or
commercial
> purpose without fear of legal problems, and it is what allows each of us
to
> contribute to Squeak without fear that our work will later be lost to some
> silly legal dispute.
>
> To me it is a privilege to be able to be a part of the Squeak community,
and
> it is worth a little bit of annoying license checking to ensure that we
will all
> be able to continue doing so in the years to come.
>
> Dave
>

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here (IANAL) my understanding was
that those agreements were only necessary to relicense the code to MIT.
Once it was relicensed it was important to tell contributors that their
contributions were MIT (for example explicitly on a code repository and in
other places that explain the licensing).  I did not believe that signed
agreements continued to be necessary going forward in that environment.  Of
course someone could release code into inbox  or mantis or somewhere else
with a statement that the code has a different license and it would be
important that anyone integrating that code reject the contribution, (or if
anyone sees such a notice to report it so that it can be removed).  But the
short of it is that all code from the relicensing going forward is MIT, all
places where contributions can be made should be clearly labeled with the
license so that it is clear that anyone contributing code is doing so and is
only allowed to do so under the same license.  

All the best,

Ron Teitelbaum



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Re: Contributor agreement

David T. Lewis
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 11:40:57PM -0400, Ron Teitelbaum wrote:

> > From: David T. Lewis
> > Sent: Monday, September 22, 2014 8:54 PM
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 09:47:48PM +0100, Frank Shearar wrote:
> > > Actually, what process do we have in place to onboard new
> > > contributors? I know the old agreement is at
> > > http://netjam.org/squeak/SqueakDistributionAgreement.pdf - is that
> > > still the right document? To whom would the new contributor mail the
> > > signed agreement? It used to be Viewpoints, but now would it be
> > > someone in the SFC?
> >
> > The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
> > the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
> > else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
> > image up to that point.
> >
> > Since the licensing was tidied up, we have all been able to proceed under
> > the current policies, which amount to making sure that all subsequent
> > contributions are provided under an MIT license. Every Squeak developer
> > with trunk commit rights has agreed to this, and we all work to the best
> of
> > our ability to ensure that both the letter and the spirit of this
> agreement
> > are faithfully preserved.
> >
> > While it can sometimes seem annoying and silly, it in reality this is
> critically
> > important to preserve the integrity of the Squeak license. That is what
> > makes it possible for all of us to use Squeak for any personal or
> commercial
> > purpose without fear of legal problems, and it is what allows each of us
> to
> > contribute to Squeak without fear that our work will later be lost to some
> > silly legal dispute.
> >
> > To me it is a privilege to be able to be a part of the Squeak community,
> and
> > it is worth a little bit of annoying license checking to ensure that we
> will all
> > be able to continue doing so in the years to come.
> >
> > Dave
> >
>
> Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here (IANAL) my understanding was
> that those agreements were only necessary to relicense the code to MIT.
> Once it was relicensed it was important to tell contributors that their
> contributions were MIT (for example explicitly on a code repository and in
> other places that explain the licensing).  I did not believe that signed
> agreements continued to be necessary going forward in that environment.  Of
> course someone could release code into inbox  or mantis or somewhere else
> with a statement that the code has a different license and it would be
> important that anyone integrating that code reject the contribution, (or if
> anyone sees such a notice to report it so that it can be removed).  But the
> short of it is that all code from the relicensing going forward is MIT, all
> places where contributions can be made should be clearly labeled with the
> license so that it is clear that anyone contributing code is doing so and is
> only allowed to do so under the same license.  
>
> All the best,
>
> Ron Teitelbaum
>

Yes, that's right.

Dave


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Re: Contributor agreement

Jecel Assumpcao Jr
In reply to this post by David T. Lewis
David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
> The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
> the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
> else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
> image up to that point.

Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
have joined us more recently:

After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
a product.

Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406). They also used
Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.

Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.

The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
your distributing Squeak.

Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
programmer initials).

One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
you all with these details.

-- Jecel


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Re: Contributor agreement

timrowledge
In reply to this post by David T. Lewis

On 23-09-2014, at 3:56 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[hidden email]> wrote:
> After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
> PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
> in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
> friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
> deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
> Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
> they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
> resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
> a product.

I *think* Apple got a slightly different deal and in fact HP etc were restricted rather more.

>
> Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
> terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
> workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406).

Don’t forget the 4405 and 4409!

[snippety-snip]

> One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
> Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions.

He later changed all that to what looks rather like an MIT license to me; the only restriction is you have to include the license header in any copy of the file and accept that there is no warranty of any sort. See
http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/squeak/trunk/platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixExternalPrims.c?view=markup for example. I used the same boilerplate for my RISC OS files. The win32 & Mac files appear to have no relevant text.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- One clown short of a circus.



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Re: Contributor agreement

Casey Ransberger-2
What Tim's describing (at a glance) looks like BSD licensing but I'd have to check.

Anyway: THIS PART IS IMPORTANT.

All new code should be contributed under the MIT license or a compatible license. To an extent, we have to trust people. If they don't tell us, we probably won't know. I am not a lawyer, but that IS my understanding.

To combat the aforementioned problem, we should be vigilant about asking questions. I was under the impression that anything in the Cincom public store (or whatever it is called) was under a Cincom open source license which is likely incompatible. Someone who knows about this should chime in, but I'm worried that incorporating code from that repository may essentially cause us to have to rip that code out later to avoid poisoning the license on the image.

Please forgive if I have this all wrong. (Again, IANAL.)

Casey

P.S.

With regard to the licensing of the code in the VM, I am less informed.

> On Sep 23, 2014, at 4:08 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>> On 23-09-2014, at 3:56 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
>> PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
>> in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
>> friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
>> deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
>> Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
>> they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
>> resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
>> a product.
>
> I *think* Apple got a slightly different deal and in fact HP etc were restricted rather more.
>
>>
>> Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
>> terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
>> workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406).
>
> Don’t forget the 4405 and 4409!
>
> [snippety-snip]
>
>> One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
>> Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions.
>
> He later changed all that to what looks rather like an MIT license to me; the only restriction is you have to include the license header in any copy of the file and accept that there is no warranty of any sort. See
> http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/squeak/trunk/platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixExternalPrims.c?view=markup for example. I used the same boilerplate for my RISC OS files. The win32 & Mac files appear to have no relevant text.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Useful random insult:- One clown short of a circus.
>
>
>

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re: Contributor agreement

ccrraaiigg

     Dozens of people wrote:

> I am not a lawyer.

     More importantly, you are not a *judge*. :)


-C

--
Craig Latta
netjam.org
+31   6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
+ 1 415  287 3547 (no SMS)


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re: Contributor agreement

Casey Ransberger-2
That's true, not a judge. Unless you count the Myers-Briggs thing, but I don't.

None of this is telling me anything about whether the code in question is available under a compatible license. Can we contact the author? Does anyone here know anything about the process of submitting code to the Cincom public store?

That's what I'd like to see. Some facts. I love Squeak. Like anything you love, you protect it. If I'm acting like an overprotective parent, I'll know as soon as I see some facts about this stuff.

Reiterate: code must be submitted under a compatible license or we shouldn't take it on. Period.

C

> On Sep 24, 2014, at 2:50 AM, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>     Dozens of people wrote:
>
>> I am not a lawyer.
>
>     More importantly, you are not a *judge*. :)
>
>
> -C
>
> --
> Craig Latta
> netjam.org
> +31   6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
> + 1 415  287 3547 (no SMS)
>
>

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re: Contributor agreement

Eliot Miranda-2
Hi Casey,

On Sep 24, 2014, at 4:40 AM, Casey Ransberger <[hidden email]> wrote:

> That's true, not a judge. Unless you count the Myers-Briggs thing, but I don't.
>
> None of this is telling me anything about whether the code in question is available under a compatible license. Can we contact the author?

Yes, I did and he's fine with it.  He's given his permission.  

> Does anyone here know anything about the process of submitting code to the Cincom public store?
>
> That's what I'd like to see. Some facts. I love Squeak. Like anything you love, you protect it. If I'm acting like an overprotective parent, I'll know as soon as I see some facts about this stuff.
>
> Reiterate: code must be submitted under a compatible license or we shouldn't take it on. Period.

Agreed but that's not the case here.

> C
>
>> On Sep 24, 2014, at 2:50 AM, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>    Dozens of people wrote:
>>
>>> I am not a lawyer.
>>
>>    More importantly, you are not a *judge*. :)
>>
>>
>> -C
>>
>> --
>> Craig Latta
>> netjam.org
>> +31   6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
>> + 1 415  287 3547 (no SMS)
>

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Contributor agreement

Louis LaBrunda
In reply to this post by David T. Lewis
Hi Jecel,

Thanks for the history and all your efforts.

Lou


On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:56:16 -0300, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr."
<[hidden email]> wrote:

>David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
>> The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
>> the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
>> else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
>> image up to that point.
>
>Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
>have joined us more recently:
>
>After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
>PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
>in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
>friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
>deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
>Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
>they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
>resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
>a product.
>
>Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
>terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
>workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406). They also used
>Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
>from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
>with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.
>
>Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
>later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
>was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
>started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
>license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
>Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
>do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
>from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
>strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
>friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
>distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
>contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
>whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
>extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.
>
>The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
>way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
>yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
>though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
>considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
>bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
>fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
>restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
>them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
>your distributing Squeak.
>
>Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
>project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
>Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
>Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
>OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
>Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
>people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
>everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
>to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
>the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
>wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
>Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
>checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
>programmer initials).
>
>One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
>Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
>and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
>problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
>available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
>Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
>future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
>other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
>available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
>but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
>you all with these details.
>
>-- Jecel
>
>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:[hidden email] http://www.Keystone-Software.com


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Re: Contributor agreement

Trygve
I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most important one should probably be called something else?
So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make a Squeak contribution?


On 24.09.2014 15:01, Louis LaBrunda wrote:
Hi Jecel,

Thanks for the history and all your efforts.

Lou


On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:56:16 -0300, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr."
[hidden email] wrote:

David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
image up to that point.
Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
have joined us more recently:

After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
a product.

Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406). They also used
Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
>from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.

Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
>from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.

The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
your distributing Squeak.

Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
programmer initials).

One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
you all with these details.

-- Jecel


-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
[hidden email] http://www.Keystone-Software.com





--

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: [hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27


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Re: Contributor agreement

Casey Ransberger-2
Hi Trygve,

The MIT license is here:


I believe that you'll find it more optimal than the BSD license by a small number of bytes. 

Cheers,

Casey

On Sep 24, 2014, at 6:50 AM, Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most important one should probably be called something else?
So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make a Squeak contribution?


On 24.09.2014 15:01, Louis LaBrunda wrote:
Hi Jecel,

Thanks for the history and all your efforts.

Lou


On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:56:16 -0300, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr."
[hidden email] wrote:

David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
image up to that point.
Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
have joined us more recently:

After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
a product.

Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406). They also used
Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
>from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.

Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
>from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.

The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
your distributing Squeak.

Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
programmer initials).

One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
you all with these details.

-- Jecel


-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
[hidden email] http://www.Keystone-Software.com





--

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: [hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27



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Re: Contributor agreement

Paul DeBruicker
In reply to this post by Trygve
I think this is the canonical one:

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT




Trygve Reenskaug wrote
I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most
important one should probably be called something else?
So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make
a Squeak contribution?


On 24.09.2014 15:01, Louis LaBrunda wrote:
> Hi Jecel,
>
> Thanks for the history and all your efforts.
>
> Lou
>
>
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:56:16 -0300, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr."
> <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> David T. Lewis wrote on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 20:54:13 -0400
>>> The signed contributor agreement was a part of the process of establishing
>>> the current Squeak licensing. I signed one of them myself, as did everyone
>>> else who was known to have contributed anything (large or small) to the
>>> image up to that point.
>> Just to add a bit to the history of the licensing issues for those who
>> have joined us more recently:
>>
>> After being developed as an internal and mostly secret project at Xerox
>> PARC for a decade, the company decided to release Smalltalk to the world
>> in the early 1980s (thanks mostly to the efforts of Adele Goldberg and
>> friends). Xerox got in touch with several other companies and made a
>> deal with Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC to give them a license to the
>> Smalltalk technology that would allow them to do absolutely anything
>> they wanted with it for free in exchange for them dedicating engineering
>> resources to help with the process of converting a research project into
>> a product.
>>
>> Later on a fifth license was granted to Berkeley but I don't know if the
>> terms were the same. Tektronix created some "artificial intelligence"
>> workstations around Smalltalk (the 4404 and 4406). They also used
>> Smalltalk in their oscilloscopes, but I am not sure if this also came
> >from Xerox. HP and DEC are now the same company and didn't do anything
>> with it, though later HP had a Distributed Smalltalk project.
>>
>> Apple did a limited release of Lisa Smalltalk to developers and this
>> later ran on Macintosh machines as well when these got enough memory. It
>> was never available to the general public. When the Squeak project was
>> started in 1996/1997 this code was the starting point and the Xerox
>> license meant that Apple could relicense it under any terms it wanted.
>> Since the Squeak group was moving from Apple to Disney, getting Apple to
>> do its very first Free Software license was key to not having to start
> >from scratch. The new SqueakL (as the license became known) tried to
>> strike a balance between the advantages of the BSD/MIT commercial
>> friendliness (so Disney could build products on top of Squeak and
>> distribute them without giving away the source) and the GPL forced
>> contributions to the common good. Which terms applied depended on
>> whether a method was considered a part of the kernel or if it was an
>> extension, which is a rather subjective thing in a monolithic image.
>>
>> The following year the term Open Source was invented and defined in a
>> way that the SqueakL didn't quite fit. This caused a lot of anguish and
>> yearly discussions about possible relicensing (always in the Spring,
>> though since it is nearly Spring where I am this thread could be
>> considered timely). Oddly enough the halfway MIT half GPL aspect never
>> bothered anybody. The complaints were about the terms for one of the
>> fonts (which was soon eliminated from the image anyway), about export
>> restrictions (which US laws impose even on licenses that don't mention
>> them) and the promise to help Apple in any lawsuit they got into due to
>> your distributing Squeak.
>>
>> Things became critical in 2006 when people in the One Laptop Per Child
>> project threatened to reject Squeak due to the license. Alan Kay called
>> Steve Jobs personally and got Apple to re-release Squeak 1.1 under the
>> Apple Community license, as allowed by their Xerox PARC license. The
>> OLPC people were not happy with that, and Alan got Jobs to release
>> Squeak 1.1 a third time under the Apache version 2 license. Then the
>> people at VPRI (Alan's research institute) started the effort to get
>> everybody who had ever added code after Squeak 1.1 to sign an agreement
>> to relicense their part from SqueakL to MIT. The focus was on Etoys, so
>> the Pharo guys extended this effort to the code in their system which
>> wasn't a part of Etoys. After that the Squeak Board started from the
>> Pharo effort and covered the whole Squeak code (my contribution was
>> checking everything that was done in early versions before we had
>> programmer initials).
>>
>> One additional detail is that when Ian Piumarta ported the Squeak VM to
>> Unix he selected to the GPL for his contributions. Since this is C code
>> and very isolated from the rest of the system nobody has ever had a
>> problem with that. But it does mean that the whole Squeak system is
>> available in 3 different licenses: parts under the GPL, parts under
>> Apache version 2 and everything else under MIT. Our policy is that all
>> future contributions have to be MIT, so the tiny parts under the two
>> other licenses will never grow. The simplification that "Squeak is
>> available under the MIT license" is good enough for nearly all purposes,
>> but some people are picky so I thought it would be a good idea to bore
>> you all with these details.
>>
>> -- Jecel
>>
>>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Louis LaBrunda
> Keystone Software Corp.
> SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
> mailto:[hidden email] http://www.Keystone-Software.com
>
>
>
>

--

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: [hidden email]
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
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re: Contributor agreement

Chris Muller-3
In reply to this post by Casey Ransberger-2
> None of this is telling me anything about whether the code in question is available under a compatible license. Can we contact the author? Does anyone here know anything about the process of submitting code to the Cincom public store?
>
> That's what I'd like to see. Some facts. I love Squeak. Like anything you love, you protect it. If I'm acting like an overprotective parent, I'll know as soon as I see some facts about this stuff.
>
> Reiterate: code must be submitted under a compatible license or we shouldn't take it on. Period.

Yes however I don't think we should say "Period" because
risk-management is not only about protecting our interests but
consuming our opportunities when the risk is reasonably low.
Copyright holders can release under a non-standard license if they
want, the burden is on the adopters, us, to assess the risk of making
a derivative work of it.  In this case, I felt the risk was
low-probability and low-impact.

Yoshiki reminded us about the possibility that someday we may not be
able to get a clarification.  In that situation we should assess the
situation, the "grayness", and make a judgement call.

>
> C
>
>> On Sep 24, 2014, at 2:50 AM, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     Dozens of people wrote:
>>
>>> I am not a lawyer.
>>
>>     More importantly, you are not a *judge*. :)
>>
>>
>> -C
>>
>> --
>> Craig Latta
>> netjam.org
>> +31 6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
>> + 1 415 287 3547 (no SMS)
>>
>>
>

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re: Contributor agreement

Frank Shearar-3
So just to finish off the discussion, the SFC as a general rule
suggest not using a CLA (Contributor Licence Agreement), feeling that
CLAs don't offer much protection, and cost a lot. You can read more
about the topic here:
http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/

So unless they the SFC change their minds and think that Squeak would,
at some later point in time, benefit from a CLA, we're done.

frank

On 24 September 2014 21:57, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:

>> None of this is telling me anything about whether the code in question is available under a compatible license. Can we contact the author? Does anyone here know anything about the process of submitting code to the Cincom public store?
>>
>> That's what I'd like to see. Some facts. I love Squeak. Like anything you love, you protect it. If I'm acting like an overprotective parent, I'll know as soon as I see some facts about this stuff.
>>
>> Reiterate: code must be submitted under a compatible license or we shouldn't take it on. Period.
>
> Yes however I don't think we should say "Period" because
> risk-management is not only about protecting our interests but
> consuming our opportunities when the risk is reasonably low.
> Copyright holders can release under a non-standard license if they
> want, the burden is on the adopters, us, to assess the risk of making
> a derivative work of it.  In this case, I felt the risk was
> low-probability and low-impact.
>
> Yoshiki reminded us about the possibility that someday we may not be
> able to get a clarification.  In that situation we should assess the
> situation, the "grayness", and make a judgement call.
>
>>
>> C
>>
>>> On Sep 24, 2014, at 2:50 AM, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>     Dozens of people wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am not a lawyer.
>>>
>>>     More importantly, you are not a *judge*. :)
>>>
>>>
>>> -C
>>>
>>> --
>>> Craig Latta
>>> netjam.org
>>> +31 6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
>>> + 1 415 287 3547 (no SMS)
>>>
>>>
>>
>

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Re: Contributor agreement

Bert Freudenberg
In reply to this post by Trygve

On 24.09.2014, at 15:50, Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most important one should probably be called something else?
> So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make a Squeak contribution?

Smalltalk license

- Bert -






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Re: Contributor agreement

Frank Shearar-3
On 26 September 2014 14:15, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> On 24.09.2014, at 15:50, Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most important one should probably be called something else?
>> So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make a Squeak contribution?
>
> Smalltalk license

Specifically, this (from http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php):

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

frank


> - Bert -

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Re: Contributor agreement

Bert Freudenberg
On 26.09.2014, at 16:05, Frank Shearar <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On 26 September 2014 14:15, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> On 24.09.2014, at 15:50, Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>>> I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most important one should probably be called something else?
>>> So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make a Squeak contribution?
>>
>> Smalltalk license
>
> Specifically, ...
I specifically meant you should print "Smalltalk licence".

- Bert -






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Re: Contributor agreement

Trygve

On 26.09.2014 16:08, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> On 26.09.2014, at 16:05, Frank Shearar <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> On 26 September 2014 14:15, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> On 24.09.2014, at 15:50, Trygve Reenskaug <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've googled "MIT Licence". There appears to be several and the most important one should probably be called something else?
>>>> So what, precisely, is "the MIT licence" that I am bound by when I make a Squeak contribution?
>>> Smalltalk license
>> Specifically, ...
> I specifically meant you should print "Smalltalk licence".
>
> - Bert -
My original concern was caused by a problem with the current Pharo
license. The problem is now fixed.
It's not clear to me how this discussion drifted onto the Squeak list,
it was probably my fault.  I apologize for the confusion.
--Trygve

12