[squeak-dev] Swazoo - LGPL or MIT?

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> True, I and Andreas are not lawyers (and even if I were, the legal
> system in my country is completely different), but at least we try to
> make sense.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of (L)GPL by any means. All I'm
trying to do is get to an accurate understanding so that I can better
argue against it.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On 22-Mar-08, at 11:46 AM, Philippe Marschall wrote:

> I don't see how money has anything to do with with. Even charging for
> GPL software is ok by anybody including the FSF.


I wasn't implying any license violation. I was noting that with Cincom  
distributing Seaside, it would be nice to know whether they're using  
the MIT license from the original distribution, or bundling it with  
the rest of VW under the NC or commercial licenses. AFAICT, they  
haven't specified, perhaps because their pricing scheme means that it  
really doesn't matter, at least for the purposes of running Seaside on  
VW.

But imagine the following scenarios:

I want to port Seaside to some new Smalltalk, and I find it's most  
convenient to start from the VW version. Can I now distribute the port  
with an MIT license?

Cincom decides to stop including Seaside in VW, and make a separate  
product that includes both a VM and Seaside-optimized image. If I  
already have a license for VW, can I extract Seaside from that product  
and just run it on VW?

I've created a product that includes a web-based component, which I  
created by modifying the version of Seaside that ships with VW. Can I  
sell that product under a comercial license?

I hope VW 7.6 will explicitly specify the licensing terms for Cincom's  
port of Seaside, so that the above questions can be answered.

Colin

> I don't see how money has anything to do with with. Even charging for
> GPL software is ok by anybody including the FSF.
>
> Cheers
> Philippe
>
>
All this is about licenced things and things are licenced to make it able to be protected by a legal system in case of conflict of interests or claims (reasonables or not).
Legal systems in all countries measures all with money. So, for instance, somebody can claim XX money because of XX damage he/she is claiming to have.

By the way DISclaimERS are also meant to help in that part. I'm seeing squeak official license also disclaims.

        cheers,

Sebastian

> Right, but the point is the behavior, not the specific license.  CLISP
> was barely using readline (just an unnecessary dress up of the UI) and
> even after the maintainer offered to repackage CLISP not to use it,
> RMS still wanted CLISP to be GPL'ed because it *could* be used with
> readline.

Actually, I do believe that he had no right to do so.  But there are
many things to consider:

1) at the time, the GPL was very new (1991) and a precedent of its
validity was badly needed;

2) the LGPL did not even exist; the LGPLv3 instead explicitly talks
about subclassing, saying that it does not consitute creating a
derivative work.

3) even the legal precedents for reverse-engineering of interfaces were
not well established.  Today there are readline implementations under
BSD license, and RMS never went against them.

Paolo

argh!
Reading that thread was good!
Re-argh!
We should really be strict on MIT all the way down.

On Mar 22, 2008, at 7:20 PM, Jason Johnson wrote:

we got you right :)
Thanks for the discussion.

Stef

On Mar 22, 2008, at 8:41 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

2008/3/22, Colin Putney <[hidden email]>:
But that again has nothing at all to do with money but only with
Cincom licensing terms.

Cheers
Philippe

Squeak map lists four packages whose name starts "Swazoo-".  None of
them show that the software is under the LGPL and three of them
wrongly suggest that Swazoo is under the MIT license.

No matter what the merits of the various licenses are, I really think
Squeak Map should be updated to explicitly show the Swazoo license as
LGPL so that no further confusion occurs.

--
Make the most of your skills - with OpenSkills
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>> True, I and Andreas are not lawyers (and even if I were, the legal
>> system in my country is completely different), but at least we try to
>> make sense.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of (L)GPL by any means. All I'm
> trying to do is get to an accurate understanding

More than enough as far as I'm concerned.

> so that I can better argue against it.

Paolo

As an ignorant lurker, this has been a quite amazing 49 posts thread. Almost nothing relevant to the original issue.

1) Squeak/Seaside community wants all included code to be under the MIT license.

2) Janko, the maintainer of Swazoo would like to officially make the Swazoo license MIT for the above reason.

So despite 49 posts, what is unresolved is whether Janko can make the Swazoo license officially MIT and what hoops he would need to jump through to do so? What is the procedure for confirming and or possibly changing a license? How many Swazoo contributors are there out there? Do they all need to be contacted? Did they all think it was GPL? Does there need to be a new release with a new license?

In addition there is the question of why Bruce Badger is so against Swazoo having the MIT license? If Squeak is MIT and Bruce is using Squeak, why is he against Swazoo being the same license?

Everyone except Bruce is saying "use only MIT" or "make the license clear and consistent" but no one is suggesting how to do so other than Bruce who is saying "Swazoo is GPL, end of story." None of this seems very constructive.


Taun

I must say I find it ironic that one of the people who said "Licenses?
 Don't worry about those!" now the victim of license concerns (i.e.
being forced to use LGPL whether he wants to or not).

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Bruce Badger <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 24/03/2008, Jason Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:
> I must say I find it ironic that one of the people who said "Licenses?
>   Don't worry about those!" now the victim of license concerns (i.e.
>  being forced to use LGPL whether he wants to or not).

Sorry, who do you mean?

--
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http://www.openskills.org/

2008/3/24, Taun Chapman <[hidden email]>:
You're confusing LGPL with GPL.

Cheers
Philippe

On 24/03/2008, Taun Chapman <[hidden email]> wrote:
> As an ignorant lurker, this has been a quite amazing 49 posts thread. Almost nothing relevant to the original issue.

Well, as the person who started the thread, perhaps I can help :-)

The thread was started because I just saw for the first time that
Swazoo was listed in Squeak Source under MIT when it should be
correctly shown under the LGPL.  If I had seen this sooner, I would
have posted sooner.

>From my point of view the immediate goal is to avoid anyone else being
led to believe that Swazoo is licensed under anything other than the
LGPL.

I doubt that we would be seeing the heat in this discussion if Swazoo
had been correctly listed in the first place.

>  In addition there is the question of why Bruce Badger is so against Swazoo having the MIT license?

Well, before this thread, nobody asked.  If you want to start a thread
proposing that and arguing in favor of that then I will contribute to
that thread.  This thread is about correcting an error which has
clearly misled people.  BTW, such a thread should be started on cls
since Hyper and even the older Swazoo HTTP code are used across many
dialects.

>  Everyone except Bruce is saying "use only MIT" or "make the license clear and consistent" but no one is suggesting how to do so other than Bruce who is saying "Swazoo is GPL, end of story." None of this seems very constructive.

No, I'm saying that Swazoo was under the LGPL start of story, and the
story has not changed.  We just need to get the story straight in
Squeak Source.

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On 21/03/2008, Janko Mivšek <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Nice that now we know who is not willing (not even considering) to do
>  something and who is.

Janko,

I notice that the license shown on the sourceforge Swazoo project has
just been changed.

Rather spookily, it has changed from LGPL to MIT.

Do you know anything about this?

Thanks,
    Bruce
--
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http://www.openskills.org/

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Bruce Badger <[hidden email]> wrote:
> On 24/03/2008, Jason Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>  > I must say I find it ironic that one of the people who said "Licenses?
>  >   Don't worry about those!" now the victim of license concerns (i.e.
>  >  being forced to use LGPL whether he wants to or not).
>
>  Sorry, who do you mean?

Janko.  A while back he was laughing at us for worrying about this
"silly license nonsense".

Jason Johnson wrote:
I'm personally still thinking the same, after all that thread even more!

First, this is not my problem in my part of the world, where I am as an
author protected by default. The fact that I'm dealing with licenses at
all is just because I take care about whole Smalltalk community and
don't like that some fundamentalists stale it!

It think a Smalltalk community need to start writing a license named
Smalltalk, an international one, then with national variants, where you
can complicate to death if you want. Just live other parts of the world
alone!

Janko


--
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si

> I notice that the license shown on the sourceforge Swazoo project has
> just been changed.
>
> Rather spookily, it has changed from LGPL to MIT.
>
> Do you know anything about this?

Seconded.  This definitely has to stop.

Paolo

On 24/03/2008, Janko Mivšek <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Jason Johnson wrote:
>  > Janko.  A while back he was laughing at us for worrying about this
>  > "silly license nonsense".
>
> I'm personally still thinking the same, after all that thread even more!
>
>  First, this is not my problem in my part of the world, where I am as an
>  author protected by default.

Janko,

Did you make the change to SourceForge to change the listed license
from LGPLto MIT?

Did you lead people in the Squeak community to think that Swazoo was
under the MIT license?

Are you now willing to help clear up the confusion caused by incorrect
documentation suggesting that Swaoo is under MIT rather than LGPL?

Thanks

--
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On 24/03/2008, Jason Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Janko.  A while back he was laughing at us for worrying about this
>  "silly license nonsense".

I saw those messages and I thought Janko was saying something similar
to Paolo i.e. that using LGPLed code in Smalltalk should be fine, so
don't worry.

Now I see he was saying that he didn't care about licenses or who
wrote (and thus held the copyright on) code, he would claim any code
to be under whatever license suited his needs at the time.

Clearly I initially read into Janko's words what I hoped to find
there.  Silly me.

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