[Cuis-dev] Politics of Smalltalk

[Casey Ransberger]

I did the final touches for the MIT relicense, and no. That wasn’t the motive. 

This isn’t a short explanation. 

So Squeak was rescued by some of the original Xerox folks via Apple Smalltalk. This meant it was technically under an old, poisonous Apple “open source“ license. Alan Kay was (somehow) dispatched by the community to speak with Steve Jobs about releasing Apple’s license hold on what if I recall was an internal Apple evolution (introduced our dynamic arrays for example) of Smalltalk-80 System Release 1. 

I wasn’t there or privy to Steve’s thoughts, but I’m guessing he was thinking something like “I’ve already scored all of the goals and so yeah, I’ll give my neighbor back his football.”

So we got the go ahead to relicense the system. People did a bunch of work to remove code that was authored by people who we couldn’t contact. The MIT license — which people are calling political, and that’s fair to an extent — was selected because it gave both contributors and users maximum liberty. 

For example, you’re free legally to use GPL v3 to do whatever you want, so long as you contribute your changes back to the community. But this requires you to host those changes, and that has a price tag. If you’re a jackass like me and not someone like Juan, that’s a lot to have to do. Under the MIT license I can do what I want, and maybe someday I’ll be hired because I was the guy who did that thing. 

Now to be clear: I believe that choice of license is important, and that we should choose based on what makes the most sense at the time. There are programs that I write that seem well suited for the GPL (read: a very broad audience and a very common good.)

I don’t entirely know why we all settled on the MIT license. I know that I had become annoyed with the fact that my employers always took my code from me but rarely if ever used it. I just wanted to be able to use my own shit. If I had to guess though, it was that at the time, Smalltalk didn’t have anti-aliased fonts. We were so far behind the rest of the world, and had so few active programmers, that we were on the verge of being a dead language. 

The GPL protects a lot of freedoms, but limits others (arguably for good reason.) Maximum freedom seemed the best solution to a problem of not-enough-programmers. Or I think that’s what happened, but ask other people. 

Or in other words:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l9nFs2PeWw0

—Casey

> On Jun 28, 2020, at 4:24 AM, Douglas Brebner via Cuis-dev <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 13/06/2020 19:46, Philip Bernhart via Cuis-dev wrote:
>> So I always wondered what the political statements and movements
>> were in Smalltalk or even Cuis Smalltalk. Squeak, Pharo and Cuis
>> did chose the very political MIT License as their License of choice.
> Dunno about the rest but wasn't the MIT license chosen mostly because of how badly the GPL family interacts with image based systems?
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