[Cuis-dev] Politics of Smalltalk

[Phil B]

Just one correction: GPL does *not* require you to host your changes.  It
only requires you to offer it (optionally for a fee) to anyone you
distribute the changed binaries to.  One does have the option to make the
fee high enough to represent the nuisance it is for some people so long as
they allow anyone else to host it if they want.  Most choose to host it
either because they want to share their changes or processing requests is
more of a headache than it's worth for them.

While I agree that the Apple license was somewhat toxic (fortunately Apple
had no interest in Squeak at that time), I remember some of the discussions
around the time of the relicense and there was more than a whiff of profit
motive on the part of some in pushing for MIT over copyleft.  Not that I'm
complaining... MIT is 'better' for anyone with a profit motive, which
includes me for some of what I'm doing.

On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 7:53 AM Casey Ransberger via Cuis-dev <
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

> 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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