People of Squeak,
This isn't going to be pretty. I can tell because my spider-sense tingles when I think about it.
One of the things I called out in my proposal was that we should collect and curate some of the documentation which is already available for Squeak and Smalltalk. Before we can do that though, I feel strongly that we should suss out the legal ramifications of doing so.
For example, I would very much like to be able to include Dr. Kay's The Early History of Smalltalk as a part of the "Squeak Curriculum." Unfortunately the top of this document says:
"Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is
granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for
direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the
title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given
that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing
Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee
and/or specific permission.
HOPL-II/4/93/MA, USA
© 1993 ACM 0-89791-571-2/93/0004/0069...$1.50" |
Since what I want to do (I think -- I Am Not A Lawyer) is republish this, I'd probably have to ask the ACM for permission. While I'm quite prepared to do so, before I can, I need to know exactly what I'm asking permission to do, which brings me to the point of this message:
I need to know what license documents in the help system should be made available under. I'm at a disadvantage here in a sense, because I don't understand the split between software free-licenses and documentation free-licenses. It really needs to be MIT compatible, if we're ever going to release the documentation on the same tape as Squeak, but I don't know of any precedent for an MIT-compatible documentation license.
While I'm excited to see how the Squeak community tackles this problem, I'm also hoping that perhaps we might be able (at some point very soon) to reach out to the SFC for guidance in this matter?
Thanks for taking the time to read this note, and thanks in advance to anyone who can help shed some light on the problem.
--
Casey Ransberger
Locked
