Proposal for a Squeak migration meeting

On 6/28/06, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Was it too long to read? :)
>
No, it was too correct to need commenting :-).

A little quote from that mail:
> But generally I think the time is right for us to "burn the disk
> packs!".

+1

Yes!

I also publish a small package AuthorChecker that computes the  
percentage of authorship per package.
Available on Squeaksource (I did not take into history).

Stef

On 28 juin 06, at 10:02, Cees De Groot wrote:

The main problem is who would do that? Since we are not even able to  
harvest fixes.
Now what we can do is to perform an audit of the assets we have and  
their status:

- NewCompiler (nearly there and could be APSL/MIT/Squeak-L)
- Tweak ?
- OmniBrowser
- MC
- YAXO

I have the impression that we cannot restart from scratch without a  
clear analysis of the current
status.

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 09:57:20AM +0200, [hidden email] wrote:
>
> Which brings us back to my post which (oddly I thought) went more or
> less totally uncommented:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-June/105229
> .html
>
> Was it too long to read? :)

No, it was a good and helpful post. IMHO, this comment from Tim is also
worth reading in the interest of good old fashioned common sense:

  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-June/105363.html

I think that the last thing anyone here needs yet another opinion
from yet another legally-uninformed person, so I won't try to
comment on legal matters.

However, I would like to say that a great deal of progress can
be made by focusing on *doing* the things that we *can* do to
resolve the problem. For example, I personally would like to be
able to send a letter or an email that clearly establishes that
all Squeak code with the initials 'dtl' is hereby relicensed in
whatever way the lawyers recommend. This will not solve the whole
problem, but it will remove one small obstacle. If we all pitch
in and remove as many obstacles as possible, the problem will
get smaller, less scary, and ultimately easier to solve.

Dave

On Jun 28, 2006, at 4:26 AM, stéphane ducasse wrote:

For what it's worth, I can verify that I do own copyright to all the  
code I've contributed to Squeak. I've refused to sign the  
Intellectual Property Agreement proposed by just about every employer  
I've had, and instead negotiated agreements that left me in control  
of my contributions to open source projects. (Smallthought is the  
only company I've worked for where this wasn't an issue.)

That means that most of OB and a good chunk of MC are "clean" from a  
licensing point of view. It wouldn't be too much work to track down  
the other contributors and either get similar verification or excise  
their contribution.

Colin

If the 3.9 team used Berts script it should have preserved the author
and timestamp information; I had updated the script to preserve it..

--- Andreas Raab <[hidden email]> wrote:

Chris Muller wrote:
> If the 3.9 team used Berts script it should have preserved the author
> and timestamp information; I had updated the script to preserve it..

I don't think this happened. I mean, I know how much work Stef is
putting into 3.9 but I just don't think that he's written more code in
3.9 alone than, say Dan, has *ever* written for Squeak ;-) See here:

>>> 2231->''stephaneducasse''
>>> 1900->''di''

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Am 29.06.2006 um 00:13 schrieb Andreas Raab:

I guess Stef used an earlier version that did not have the fix by Chris.

Anyhow, to get the actual list of contributors youl'd have to find  
the authors of *every* earlier version anyway, so for the problem at  
hand this is irrelevant (though it would be preferrable to have the  
initials intact). Also, if, say, a parameter was added to a method  
and the old one deleted, shouldn't it still be considered the same  
method? Or if it was simply renamed? We lose the history in both cases.

- Bert -

uNewsgroups: gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.general
Subject: Re: [SPAM] Re: Proposal for a Squeak migration meeting
References: <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]>
--text follows this line--
"David T. Lewis" <[hidden email]> writes:
> I think that the last thing anyone here needs yet another opinion
> from yet another legally-uninformed person, so I won't try to
> comment on legal matters.

You beat me to it.  I would shy away from saying we *should* assume
that Disney has rights at all over the public Squeak content.  It is a
subtle question.  Cees accurately points out why they might, but Alan
Kay has also pointed out why they should not.  This needs a real
lawyer.

Additionally, let me reiterate that there are many ways forward
regardless of how the question is answered.



> However, I would like to say that a great deal of progress can
> be made by focusing on *doing* the things that we *can* do to
> resolve the problem. For example, I personally would like to be
> able to send a letter or an email that clearly establishes that
> all Squeak code with the initials 'dtl' is hereby relicensed in
> whatever way the lawyers recommend. This will not solve the whole
> problem, but it will remove one small obstacle. If we all pitch
> in and remove as many obstacles as possible, the problem will
> get smaller, less scary, and ultimately easier to solve.


Agreed.  This part is very doable, and is worth focussing on.


-Lex


PS -- Goran, I read your message.  I simply responded to it and
several other posts simultaneously.


PPS -- Anyone interested in realistic open-source legal issues might
want to read about the careful and deliberative way Wikipedia used to
relicense their content to GFDL.  ;)

Sure, it was included only recently (I'm not even sure).
My goal was never to change ownership of methods just to make sure we  
harvest changes. If someone wants to participate
we are still looking for people.

Stef

On 29 juin 06, at 00:13, Andreas Raab wrote:

stéphane ducasse <[hidden email]> writes:

There is a lot of existing Squeak content.  There are 200 packages in
the 3.7 stable package universe.  It takes hours just to *read* this
list.  Imagine how long it would take to reproduce it all.

In fact, this would be a good threshold to keep in mind before
starting over: how long will it take to get back to zero?  Until you
are back to zero, many people will want to continue with the current
system.


-Lex

Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> writes:

Yes, you are right.  This only lists the last person to touch a
method.  It does suggest there are less than 200 major authors of the
code in Squeak.  However, to get a completely accurate list, you'd
indeed want to scan through all of the deltas since Squeak 1.1.
Deltas would include the update changes (10,000 or so?) and presumably
all Monticello versions of packages in the full image.

By the way, what is the initials problem you are discussing?  I can
believe that the number of methods refactored by Stephane is larger
than the number of Dan's methods left untouched.  Is the issue you
mention more troubling than that?  For example, are there initials on
methods that have nothing to do with the identified person?



> Also, if, say, a parameter was added to a method
> and the old one deleted, shouldn't it still be considered the same
> method? Or if it was simply renamed? We lose the history in both cases.

We can obtain that history, if we improve on the way I calculated the
list of authors.  Given history information, I believe these questions
would mostly be moot.  There is only a problem if some of the versions
were written by more obscure authors that we cannot contact.

To handle the last few remaining methods, it may be helpful to have a
clean-room reimplementation team.....

-Lex

Am 30.06.2006 um 12:07 schrieb Lex Spoon:

> By the way, what is the initials problem you are discussing?

Stef used a script to convert underscore-assignment to colon-equal-
assignment. An earlier version of that script did not preserve the  
former author initials.

FixUnderscores-bf.8 is the one in the 3.9 repository (http://
source.squeakfoundation.org/39a.html) while the initials-fix is in  
FixUnderscores-cmm.10 (http://source.impara.de/underscore.html).

- Bert -

Bert Freudenberg a écrit :
Any way this should not be an issue as author tracking could be done
with any pre-3.9 and post-1.1 image.

Hilaire

> Which brings us back to my post which (oddly I thought) went more or
> less totally uncommented:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-June/105229
> .html
>
> Was it too long to read? :)
>> No, it was too correct to need commenting :-).
>

    No, it was too scary to think of it.

    It's more comfortable to have head in sand ;-)
 
> A little quote from that mail:
> > But generally I think the time is right for us to "burn the disk
> > packs!".

    Actually, I wished i had been done at the ModSqueak time.

    Cheers,

    SmallSqueak

On Jun 30, 2006, at 5:47 AM, Lex Spoon wrote:

Whoa. So far this is the first suggestion I've seen that we should  
worry about the licensing of anything other than the core image. The  
goal here is to be able to say that "Squeak is Open Source (tm)" and  
be able to have it included in OS distributions, or pitch it to  
customers on that basis. That code doesn't require that every bit of  
code in the Squeak universe comply. The packages on SM can be  
licensed however the authors choose, and it's up to them to manage  
the consequences of their choices.

I think Steph brought up those packages because they are or have been  
included in the core Squeak distribution at one time or another.  
They're also big chunks of code with few contributors and should thus  
be fairly easy to get relicensed.

Colin

stéphane ducasse a écrit :
The reason may not be only for a lack a human resources. People may
think it does not worth the effort for a project where the license issue
 has not be fixed. I bet that with a better integration of Squeak in the
free software community we may have more success in harvesting and
things like that.



Yeah, regarding code owned by Dysney, I guess Morph anbd Etoys count for
a major part, right?

In the other hand, reading at the Tweak RoadMap, in particular:

---
Morphic+MVC Removal

Tweak 1.0 should have enough support to be able to drop Morphic and MVC
from it; 1.1 should be complete enough to be able to do all programming
activities in Tweak itself (ToolBuilder might affect this).
---

It looks like Morph and Etoys should be replaced step by step by Tweak.
At least it will be a major move forward regarding the Squeak
integration in the free software community...


Hilaire

Ok I will use the new version of that script

Stef

Yes and also because I was thinking in terms of core functionality.

Stef

So know I still wonder is the objective of Tweak is still to replace the
morphic layer or did the objective changed?

Hilaire


Hilaire Fernandes a écrit :