Proposal for a Squeak migration meeting

While at the 14th International Smalltalk Conference 2006[1], I am
proposing we set a meeting during all the week to establish a  migration
plan to get the next version of Squeak released under a  licence
compatible with the free software community (probably APSL2 in our case).

As a free software activist and developer, I always get political
difficulty to promote Squeak because of its licence. For me it is
already free but most of the free software community and my friend  do
not share this point of view. It is really a problem because  most
people get stuck to the licence problem and they can't  discover all the
great stuff coming with Squeak and Smalltalk.

Getting the next Squeak released under a free software licence,
compatible with the free software community, will help us if we  want
our community to grow, and we all fell the potential for the  growth is
there. A bigger community will be a great benefice for  all of us: more
people writing great library frameworks, developers  could get more
support from the free software oriented  corporations, a well known
Squeak will open new business  opportunity, educators will be more
exposed to Squeak and they will  produce more teaching materials. In
fact we will just be able to  take benefice of the great promotion
machinery of the free software  community. Anyway I am just repeating
things you already know.

Back to the meeting idea. The only output of this meeting will be a
migration plan, to establish wish bits need to be removed,  rewritten,
relicenced. It is more a meta-migration meeting than a  migration
meeting, but still it is a first step we need to work on.  To establish
a realistic migration plan, the helps of Squeak  experts will be an
absolute necessity.
Great Squeakers as Marcus Denker, Stephane Ducasse, Adrian  Leinhardt,
Lukas  Renggli, Mike Rueger (impara) will attend the  International
Smalltalk conference. We can take the opportunity of  the physical
presence of these experts to get great insights for a  realistic
migration plan.

I am proposing for 4 or 5 days meeting, taking place after the  daily
conferences. The meeting could last for two hours, 17:00-19:00.

As a matter of facts, which experts are ready to join such a meeting?


Hilaire
--
ADD R0,R1,R2,LSL #2

> I am proposing for 4 or 5 days meeting, taking place after the  daily
> conferences. The meeting could last for two hours, 17:00-19:00.

I'm not an expert but I fully agree with you. It's *very* important to
throw all this licence problems.

Hi Hilaire--

        I'd very much like to attend, but I can't afford it.


-C

(San Francisco, CA, USA)

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Hi Hilaire

.....
> As a free software activist and developer, I always get political
> difficulty to promote Squeak because of its licence. For me it is
> already free but most of the free software community and my friend  do
> not share this point of view. It is really a problem because  most
> people get stuck to the licence problem and they can't  discover all the
> great stuff coming with Squeak and Smalltalk.
>
...
I'm totally agree with you, I didn't understood why the Squeak License
is too different from the other from opensource and free software
movement. In my opinion is better to rethinking this licensing
politics to promote Squeak and grow in the opensource community.
Squeak is an amazing tool as educational environment, it's a great occasion.

Best Regards

--
--------------------------
Davide Arrigo

Hi people!

"Davide Arrigo" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Now, if you would be more familiar with all twists and turns in the
history of Squeak and know what parts of Squeak have been made by whom
etc, then you would probably be aware of the following:

1. Most Squeakers would really like to have Squeak under a BSD/MIT-ish
license. So it is not that we don't *want* to. Licensing is being
discussed yearly in very long threads and things are exlained over and
over again. Check archives.

2. Squeak 3.9 consists of code from:
        a) Apple (available today under Squeak-L or APSL2 which is nice). I am
guessing about 20% of the code.
        b) Disney (under Squeak-L). I am guessing at least 40%-60% of the code.
        c) Probably (just a guess) several hundreds of individuals (available
under Squeak-L and in some cases also MIT)
        d) A few other organisations I am guessing (available under Squeak-L
and possibly also MIT).

3. In order to change the license of Squeak 3.9 to APSL2 we would need
to:
        a) Get all parties b-d above to agree to do that. I am guessing c) and
d) would be doable (even though c) is a major undertaking to get done
properly) - but the really tricky one is b).

4. In order to change the license of Squeak 3.9 to MIT we would need to:
        a) Get all parties a-d above to agree to do that. Since we just went
through this discussion with Apple and I think MIT was on the table as
an option, I do not think it would either be wise nor successful to try
to get it under MIT now that we just managed to get it under APSL2.

5. There are also other licensees of the original Smalltalk-80 code that
might be an interesting option (Craig, Dan or Alan knows more).


IMHO changing the license of Squeak 3.9 *in full* (and doing it only in
part is not interesting) is *very hard* if not impossible. Again the big
hurdle is b) above.  I know Alan has presented a different view on b),
but AFAIK it is still clear that Disney owns that code and in order to
change the license of it we need Disney to do it.

Sooo.... IMHO it boils down to a big RESTART of Squeak and doing that
*just* for licensing is quite silly. BUT... there are other technical
reasons for our community to take on such a task anyway so perhaps it is
acually doable. Now, let's dream a little :) :

Step 1. Say Ian makes the Magic only he can do and presents his
remarkable "Id" with "Pepsi" etc after the summer and squeak-dev goes
bonkers of joy. This latest work from Ian is all MIT licensed AFAIK and
could make a compelling new base for us to build something ENTIRELY NEW
and very exciting on. I have toyed with hist Idst-5.1 from his website
and it is very cool stuff. I have also exchanged some emails with Ian
and I look forward to some kind of posting from him about this but that
is Ian's ball of course.

Step 2. The other VM guys agree that the regular "old" Squeak VM scheme
has reached its limit and perhaps 3.9 will not be the base of Grand 4.0
but instead goes into "maintenance mode" and is followed by 3.10, 3.11
with only smaller modifications and enhancements. And stays Squeak-L as
today. The VM group decides to adopt Ian's work (Id etc) as the base for
a new Squeak and a Team is formed to try to get the low level pieces in
place. This is hard technical work and will take a while.

Step 3. A small clean kernel "image" is produced which is MIT licensed.
Perhaps we can use Spoon as a base, or perhaps we can use Smalltalk-80
from one of the other original licensees and get it under MIT (Craig?)
or perhaps we just write something from scratch (unsure of the code Ian
has in Idst for example). It is then brought into graphical life with
Tweak as the UI framework and Toolbuilder to make backporting tools from
Squeak 3.9 easier.

Step 4. More tools are brought over from old Squeak into the New Squeak.
It gets inhabitable. At this point the "general Squeaker" can also join.
Up until this step we need dedicated people - because it will not be a
pleasant place to live in. Only MIT code should of course be let into
the "base" image.

Step 5. Eventually porting begins of the top level pieces from the
Squeak world. Seaside, KomHttpServer/Swazoo etc.

And tada, life is nice. A dream? Something doable? I dunno. What I do
know is that it would take a few years to pull off all those steps and
that it would take *lots* of stamina from Step 1 to Step 4. Before this
New Squeak is inhabitable we can only rely on a handful of really
talented Squeakers and VM guys to get us to Step 4 - and they are
typically busy with lots of other projects.

But generally I think the time is right for us to "burn the disk
packs!". We have several technical pieces lined up (Spoon, Id/Pepsi,
Exupery), we have several high profile projects (Croquet, Sophie etc) in
need, we have a community that is strong and an elected board that
should be capable of pulling of reasonable organisation of it all. And
we have burned ourselves enough times on the "let's get this cleaned
up...". It just too hard work.

regards, Göran

PS. All the above is *my* perception of things and there may be several
factual omittings or errors. :)

On 14.06.2006, at 17:44, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

>
> I am proposing for 4 or 5 days meeting, taking place after the  
> daily conferences. The meeting could last for two hours, 17:00-19:00.
>
> As a matter of facts, which experts are ready to join such a meeting?
>

I would be interested.

         Marcus

The really first step that could be reused in any future is to  
develop a small application that let
the user identify himself, and declare that all the code he sent to  
the mailing-list and that have been harvested is under
MIT/BSD/Squeak-L.

Stef

On 14 juin 06, at 17:44, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

To do it the formal way, will it not be better that such persons sign a
paper where they declared to be the owner of clearly identified pieces
of code and agree to release it under the XXX/YYY licence

Providing a model document will be the only needed things

The question is who should be the recipient of such documents. The
Squeak Foundation seems to be out of sync (concern?) regarding the
licence matter...

Hilaire

stéphane ducasse a écrit :

On 15-Jun-06, at 11:34 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:

> The really first step that could be reused in any future is to  
> develop a small application that let
> the user identify himself, and declare that all the code he sent to  
> the mailing-list and that have been harvested is under
> MIT/BSD/Squeak-L.

Yup, a simple Seaside app hosted on seasidehosting.st would do it and  
in a cool way. Or a bit more mundane but still effective would be a  
swiki page.

Is a seaside person interested?
>
>
> On 14 juin 06, at 17:44, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
>
>> --
>> ADD R0,R1,R2,LSL #2
EORS R0, R1, R1, LSL #1


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Never trust a computer you can't lift.

tim Rowledge a écrit :

>> On 14 juin 06, at 17:44, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
>>
>>> --
>>> ADD R0,R1,R2,LSL #2
>
> EORS R0, R1, R1, LSL #1

Wow, it is a great improvement, especially for the Squeak license mess.

Hilaire

I do not know. In fact I'm not working on the license aspects, may be  
other members
have more information than me.

I asked the foundation if we could get such a template but so far, I  
got no reaction.

Stef

Hi Stef--

 > I asked the foundation if we could get such a template but so far, I
 > got no reaction.

        Yes you did, from Tim. It was also the weekend; perhaps it would be
reasonable to wait a bit longer before making accusations.


-C

--
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume

On 6/19/06, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:
>  > I asked the foundation if we could get such a template but so far, I
>  > got no reaction.
>
>         Yes you did, from Tim. It was also the weekend; perhaps it would be
> reasonable to wait a bit longer before making accusations.
>
I haven't seen any mail on that subject - what's the Subject line?

Craig

I asked that kind of question in the first private email we got just  
after the announce of the APSL2/0 license.
So this is not "over the week-end" point!

Stef


On 19 juin 06, at 09:42, Craig Latta wrote:

Hi Stef--

        The message of yours to which I was referring was
<[hidden email]>. The message of
Tim's to which I was referring was
<[hidden email]>. Apparently you had
a different message of yours in mind.

        Regardless, from the above messages I assert that the board is
discussing this issue. We have also scheduled live meetings via instant
messaging, as you well know. I encourage you to bring up anything
important to you at those meetings. If you think they should be held
more often, you should say so. Carping about a lack of response from the
board in public is simply unconstructive and rude.

        Please, let's take this to private discussion.


        thanks,

-C

--
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume

For me these were the same topic. If I want to code that application  
what is the legal text I need not to fuck up.

Stef

On 19 juin 06, at 20:39, Craig Latta wrote:

Dear all,

May be we could refocus on the subject of the thread, then think about
the details later.

So far only Marcus wrote he will participate to such a meeting. Graid
said he would like but he cannot.
I am curious to know what think the other.

Hilaire

On 6/20/06, Hilaire Fernandes <[hidden email]> wrote:
> I am curious to know what think the other.
>
Whether such a meeting, without presence of legal council, would be
effective, I don't know. It seems that the original proposal was eaten
by gremlins, because I can't find it in my mailbox, so I might be
drawing premature conclusions from the snippets that were quoted in
various responses.

But I can't attend in any case - I don't have the budget, nor the free
time this year to attend  stuff :(

Regards,

Cees

Cees De Groot a écrit :
> On 6/20/06, Hilaire Fernandes <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> I am curious to know what think the other.
>>
> Whether such a meeting, without presence of legal council, would be
> effective, I don't know. It seems that the original proposal was eaten
> by gremlins, because I can't find it in my mailbox, so I might be
> drawing premature conclusions from the snippets that were quoted in
> various responses.

If you are interested by the issue, you check the archive, even if you
cannot attend

Hilaire

On 20-Jun-06, at 1:36 AM, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> May be we could refocus on the subject of the thread, then think  
> about the details later.
>
> So far only Marcus wrote he will participate to such a meeting.  
> Graid said he would like but he cannot.
> I am curious to know what think the other.
Sadly there's no chance I could join the meeting; time and money  
preclude it. To those that can make it I can only offer support from  
the sidelines along with the statement that any bit of code I've ever  
submitted can be considered to be under any license that is plausible  
for Squeak.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- One too many lights out in his Christmas tree.