I want to sign license agreement

I have not actually made a contribution to Squeak yet but
I have reported a bug (Mantis 0003474) which includes the
code to fix the bug. 

Thus I would like to sign the Squeak license agreement.
So could someone send me the agreement to sign and
tell me where to send it.
These days it might help if you send me a stamped
envelope to send it in as well.  :-(

-------------------------------------------------------------------

For the curious the new code allows sets to do adds
with about 14% fewer compares.
It is not really a bug, just a performance issue.

The bug was reported 20 months ago so nobody seems to
care to incorporate it into Squeak.
I think I will put the code into a package and release it so
those who want to can add it to their copy of Squeak.

Regards,

Ralph Boland

> I think I will put the code into a package and release it so
> those who want to can add it to their copy of Squeak.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ralph Boland
>  
Dear Ralph,

feel free to add it to the package 'Kernel-Extensions' in the project
'311' on squeaksource.

This is open access for anyone who wishes to contribute contributions to
future versions of squeak. Whether or not these changes become official
will be up to a future release team, but for now here is a place to put
them (until we have DeltaStreams)

regards

Keith

The license agreement is at
http://netjam.org/squeak/SqueakDistributionAgreement.pdf

Isn't signing a license agreement for new contributions overkill? Most
other open source projects require nothing like that - just an
electronic text clearly stating the license that the author is using is
often enough.

For relicensing previously released code things are entirely different,
of course. But even in that case my impression is that people are being
unreasonable cautious when suggesting that any code that ends up being
rewritten should go through a full "clean team" process. The first time
I saw that use was by Compaq for reverse engineering the BIOS in the IBM
PC. They had left Texas Instruments which had refused to build a clone
for fear of lawsuits from IBM and so had every reason to be as careful
as possible. IBM did sue three clone makers in Brazil (1983) who copied
the BIOS directly but dropped the suit after they showed a token effort
to rewrite it themselves (basically just shuffling around non critical
code). This proved that Compaq had worried too much.

About the relicensing discussion in general, it is unfortunate that our
technical means (the author initials) don't match the legal reality.
Whoever wrote the original method from scratch is the author. If someone
made some change then they created a derived work and their copyrights
only cover the part that they changed. If we have permission to
relicense from the first author but not from the second then all we have
to rewrite is the small modification, not the whole thing.

About contacting the heirs of authors who passed away, I know from
experience that some will be very happy about it while others will be
extremely annoyed. You can't know which is which until you have tried.

-- Jecel

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 02:24:46PM +0000, Keith Hodges wrote:
> feel free to add it to the package 'Kernel-Extensions' in the project
> '311' on squeaksource.

I think he means http://www.squeaksource.com/391/

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

Matthew Fulmer wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 02:24:46PM +0000, Keith Hodges wrote:
>  
>> feel free to add it to the package 'Kernel-Extensions' in the project
>> '311' on squeaksource.
>>    
>
> I think he means http://www.squeaksource.com/391/
>  
I meant '311' ;-)

Keith

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 06:23:15AM +0000, Keith Hodges wrote:
you should use a url or something. typing in 311 in the project
search box yields no projects. But now that you insist, I do see
http://squeaksource.com/311/ . sorry

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

> Isn't signing a license agreement for new contributions overkill? Most
> other open source projects require nothing like that - just an
> electronic text clearly stating the license that the author is using is
> often enough.

  Yes, there was a discussion among the board members on this issue.
I agree with that we have to get the signature from new contributors,
if we put a notice on squeak.org basically saying "don't contribute
code if you don't license it under MIT."

  At this point, we are hearing suggestions from a lawyer at
Conservation, and Craig has been talking with them.  (Thank you
Craig!)

-- Yoshiki