Moving the license debate forward

Janko rather likes to cast me as the intransigent one, but I think
that's a bit unfair.  Yes, I did feel it necessary to make a firm
stand against his (illegal) attempt to change the license by simply
telling the Squeak community that it had changed, but as anyone
reading this list will see, I have taken time to try to understand the
issues.  Also, I have held my discussions in the open, not behind
closed doors.

It's good that we have these responses here.  Of course, we don't know
what questions the responses were to, and so we can't read them in
context, but I think we can assume that Janko has cherry picked the
comments from his private conversations that best support his
preferred license :-)

I do see that there are some issues with the LGPL for Smalltalk, and I
think it would be good to have a share-alike license for Smalltalk
libraries that people are more comfortable with.  Alan Knight has done
some work along these lines with his modified LGPL license which is
used for Glorp.

So, would Alan's modified LGPL license (or something like it) be a
reasonable contender if we were to move from the out-of-the-box LGPL?

All the best,
    Bruce
--
Make the most of your skills - with OpenSkills
http://www.openskills.org/

Bruce Badger wrote:

> I do see that there are some issues with the LGPL for Smalltalk, and I
> think it would be good to have a share-alike license for Smalltalk
> libraries that people are more comfortable with.  Alan Knight has done
> some work along these lines with his modified LGPL license which is
> used for Glorp.
>
> So, would Alan's modified LGPL license (or something like it) be a
> reasonable contender if we were to move from the out-of-the-box LGPL?

As you can hear from discussions from Squeak and also Seaside
communities they are now even more MIT and nothing else mood, so I'm
sure any other license than MIT won't be acceptable for them. Therefore
we don't have much maneuring place anymore.

Janko

2008/7/7 Janko Mivšek <[hidden email]>:
> As you can hear from discussions from Squeak and also Seaside
> communities they are now even more MIT and nothing else mood, so I'm
> sure any other license than MIT won't be acceptable for them. Therefore
> we don't have much maneuring place anymore.

Squeak et al are free to choose the philosophical approach that suits
them.  More power too them, too.  Great stuff.

Now, back to Swazoo.  Swazoo was founded under a share-alike license
and that is what attracted many contributors, so changing that should
not be on a lemming like whim basis.  What were the concrete problems
that were raised against our current license, the LGPL?  I think many,
if not all are addressed in other share-alike licenses, are they not?

--
Make the most of your skills - with OpenSkills
http://www.openskills.org/