Two important issues...

Avi Bryant avi at
Tue Feb 18 09:30:58 UTC 2003

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 goran.hultgren at wrote:

> I am not sure what you mean with "the base image". In my perception of
> the future there simply is no such thing. There are only groups of
> packages, and some of them are "core" to Squeak which means they are
> under Squeak-L and can be depended upon, the community takes care of
> them etc.

Well, from a licensing point of view, all that matters is what images are
distributed, say from the download site.  This is what I mean
by "base image".  Any package that is only loaded after the user downloads
the image, can have any license it wants without affecting anything.  So I
think it's useful when talking about licenses to distinguish between what
we expect to distribute as an image and what we expect to distribute as
packages.  The Parser itself I would expect to be in virtually any image
that was available, so definitely needs to be Squeak-L.  The tools for
generating the Parser I would expect to be available separately, whether
they're under Squeak-L or not.

> But perhaps that is what you mean.
> > why do we care about the license as long as it's
> > freely available?
> Ok, but what happens in the future when John and the guys decide to turn
> SmaCC into a proprietary product? Then we have a core piece of Squeak
> that we can't change without using a non "Squeak free" tool.

As long as the current version of SmaCC is licensed acceptably (and
obviously we'll have to figure out what that means, but that's much
wider than Squeak-L IMO), it doesn't matter how later versions are

> Personally I think it is an important problem. And principally it would
> feel much better IMHO if all parts of Squeak where under Squeak-L -
> including the tools inside Squeak. For example, what would your reaction
> have been if SqueakMap was not under Squeak-L?

SqueakMap is something that is useful to 99% of Squeak users, and thus
is almost certain to be in any image we wish to distribute.  The same does
not hold for SmaCC.

In what way is needing a non-Squeak-L parser generator when building the
parser different from needing a non-Squeak-L C compiler when building the
VM?  GCC doesn't need to be under Squeak-L because we only need
to distribute its output, and it is licensed such that we know we'll
always be able to use it when we need to; it seems to me that SmaCC would
be much the same thing.


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