[Cuis-dev] Politics of Smalltalk

[Douglas Brebner]

On 28/06/2020 13:17, Casey Ransberger via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Hi Douglas! No, the license wasn’t chosen because the GPL hates snapshots or something. I mean look at all the hypervisors.


Well, I'm pretty sure that the GPL family were excluded from 
consideration due to how very strongly they are based on the concept of 
separate source and object files being compiled and linked. Image based 
Common Lisp systems have the same problem. IIRC, even rms admitted it 
was a bad fit for image based systems.

 From what I remember the argument was that filing in code = static 
linking = entire distributed image had to be (L)GPL if it contained any 
(L)GPL code.

That doesn't explain why MIT was chosen but it does explain why GPL was 
excluded.


> There was a problem with the image in that the lawyers at (what’s that thing called? Something mumble freedom conservancy or some such?) hadn’t encountered this image thing before.
>
> Their guidance was that we should put the license at the top of every source code file. People tried to explain Smalltalk, lawyers blinked, eventually Andreas Raab wrote to me and told me to put the license in as a comment at the beginning of .sources file, and that seemed to settle it.


Now that I hadn't heard of.

I actually remember a little bit about it since I've been keeping tabs 
on Squeak on and off since the initial unix vm release. (I even helped a 
bit with getting the NetBSD audio support working.)


> You can see my other email on the choice of license, or also not.


I think I do remember reading a squeak-ml email about *someones* 
annoyance with employers claiming their code then sitting on it. Didn't 
remember who it was though.