[squeak-dev] Swazoo, history of mentioning of license

Dear all,

Second Swazoo history post is about mentioning all posts where Swazoo
license is mentioned. As I already said, I don't remember any discussion
to define a license but it was set on SourceForge back in 2000 and
that's a source of all license mess, IMHO.


1. apr00 by Joseph Bacanskas [1]:

At CampSmalltalk, I participated in the start of a web application
server project named Swazoo (Smalltalk Web Application Zoo).  It is an
ambitious project that has a great deal of very fine work contributed by
Janko Misvek (Aida) and Ken Treis (an HTTP/1.1 server).  Swazoo is an
ongoing project being hosted on SourceForge. (http://sourceforge.net)
search for Swazoo.  You can get
the current code from there.  Further information about Swazoo is
available at: http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/CampSmalltalk

Swazoo is an open source project under the LGPL license...



2. nov02 by Steve Waring [2]:

 > is there some kind soul which could tell me if
 > Swazoo could be used in commercial app (and
 > distributed as part of it) ?

The license is LGPL. My understanding of LGPL is that you can use and
distributed Swazoo with a commercial app. That is only my understanding;
I am not a lawyer, and I find the GNU licenses almost impossible to read....



3. feb06 c.l.s thread "Long Lists n Client/Server aplication" [3]

Bruce Badger:
...
I guess Swazoo is a problem too, it being under the GPL and all.
Perhaps this is part of the reason that Squeak is not in Debian yet?
...

Janko Mivsek:

Bruce, as far as I know there is no explicit license for Swazoo but it
has the same as other Camp Smalltalk projects like SUnit. Therefore it
is definitively not GPL. On the other side I don't know if we ever
define a "Camp Smalltalk" license...

Bruce Badger:

Janko, that's not what it says here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/swazoo/
And it's under that license that I picked it up and started working with
it.

Bruce Badger:

I dug around a little more, and the Internet Archive shows that Swazoo
has been under an FSF license in SourceForge from the beginning:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://sourceforge.net/projects/swazoo/

Swazoo started out in SourceForge  being explicitly licensed under the
LGPL, but the latest version of the page shows that it is available as
wither the GPL *or* the LGPL.

We (OpenSkills) started working with Swazoo in the LGPL only era, and
the LGPL license applies to all the work we have done on Swazoo since we
picked it up.  So, the latest version published by me in the Store
repository is 100% under the LGPL.

Janko Mivsek

Hmm, I must admit that I see that license statement for a first time. It
was probably set up in year 2000 just after first Camp Smalltalk when
GPL was very "popular" and on the other side noone cared much about
license anyway.

Anyway, LGPL is fine for me but if someone propose better license for
Smalltalk projects like Swazoo, it is my opinion that we should listen.

Bruce Badger:

So, back to Squeak and FSF licenses.  if Squeak has a problem with FSF
licenses, what impact does that have on Swazoo being used in Squeak?

I'm not clear on what the problem with FSF licenses is from the Squeak
POV, and I really would like to understand the situation.

Bruce Badger
...
As we now all agree that Swazoo is under the LGPL, what does this mean
for Swazoo?

Perhaps the Squeak community could raise this issue with the FSF as part
of the on-going debate about GPL 3?

Reinout Heeck

 > Anyway, LGPL is fine for me but if someone propose better license for
 > Smalltalk projects like Swazoo, it is my opinion that we should listen.

Personally I prefer the MIT or modified BSD license.

It doesn't stipulate that code modifications are given back to the
community, making it easier on commercial reusers of the code.

Rather the decision to share enhancements is driven by the cost of
maintaining a private fork of a library, I think this is much more
pragmatic than stipulating source availability like the (L)GPL does,
thus giving more choice.

I also very much like the fact that these licenses fit on half a page, I
can actually understand them...

Steven Kelly

Good points: with (L)GPL, you basically have no security. It just
doesn't matter what a sensible interpretation, or even your lawyer's
interpretation, of the license might mean. If someone takes you to
court, you're at the mercy of the opposing lawyer, judge and jury that
day, and they're about as consistent and likely to make correct
decisions as the patent office.

Alan Knight

 > As we now all agree that Swazoo is under the LGPL, what does this mean
 > for Swazoo?

 > Perhaps the Squeak community could raise this issue with the FSF as
 > part of the on-going debate about GPL 3?

The LGPL certainly doesn't address it directly, although depending what
you think it means it might be possible that the LGPL usage was
permitted. That's what we did with Glorp (on legal advice). We added
some extra text with the code to explicitly state what the relevant
interpretation of Smalltalk library usage meant. Legal advice also
didn't think that the author of a license is allowed to redefine what
constitutes a derivative work in law, making much of that text in the
FSF licenses likely to be moot anyway.


[1]http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.smalltalk/browse_thread/thread/af89bdea0514f5d3/569ac92aef913be8?lnk=st&q=swazoo+license#569ac92aef913be8
[2]http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.smalltalk.dolphin/browse_thread/thread/c517661061096043/e9f0e2416ac8d8fb?lnk=st&q=swazoo+license#e9f0e2416ac8d8fb
[3]http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.smalltalk/browse_thread/thread/665597fea7a67332/b01b6f5e32d06521?lnk=st&q=swazoo+license#b01b6f5e32d06521


Best regards
Janko


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

The only important point here is this:

On 25/03/2008, Janko Mivšek <[hidden email]> wrote: The rest just talks about problems people have with various licenses,
and there are as many of those as the day is long.

Swazoo was promoted as an LGPL project, of this there is no doubt.

Is Janko now saying that people who contributed to Swazoo were duped?
Or are the people thinking that Swazoo is under MIT being duped?  Or
are we all being duped because Janko has something else in mind for
the future?

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