Go"ran:
Thank you for the reply. I still feel that we are misunderstanding each other in some part. You wrote: > > No, I think Cees understood (this question has been hammered to death on the Squeak >list) but he > might have expressed himself a bit unclear. > > The problem we are facing is that even if the community would like to go for a >BSD/MIT like > license (which would be GPL compatible) we do not have the final word here. Apple is >in charge > (being the owner of a large, but hard to define, part of the core). Ah yes. I see that this could be a problem with adopting a GPL-compatible license. > We are (as far as I know) > approaching Apple with the proposal that: > > 1. They transfer the license to Squeak Foundation. But that is probably not going to >happen. If it > happens we would probably make a new license (BSD/MIT whatever) which would work >with GPL. Note > though further below on that. That makes sense to me. > 2. If they don't agree with the above, they change the license to APSL which (I >assume) is not GPL > compatible. Or at least recraft SqueakL to be "like" APSL in the questionable >clauses. I don't know anything about APSL, but looking at the FSF's license list [1], I agree with you that APSL is not GPL compatible. > And finally - there are still special problems with an image-based >language/environment like > Squeak/Smalltalk when it comes to GPL - linking is too vaguely defined. We have a >very good IP > lawyer that has spoken with Mr Stallman about that problem but according to him >(Andrew Greenberg) > Mr Stallman wasn't interested in the problem. This is the part where I get confused. How can the meaning of "linking" with regard to multimedia files affect the license's GPL-compatibility? Ah! I think I see now. You might for example release Squeak with a license which is itself GPL compatible, but you might also include media data with Squeak which is not licensed freely, and then the whole Squeak package might be GPL-incompatible. Is that what you mean? Regards, Zooko [1] http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html --- zooko.com Security and Distributed Systems Engineering --- -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3