A comment on the license

[Andreas Raab]

Folks -

Let me throw in a word or two of explanation about the license: First,
we're not going to change it. The choice of license was a combination
of business and legal reasoning and the only alternative to our choice
of GPLv2 would have been not to be able to open source anything. It's
as simple as that.

That said, I think there is a way by which we can have our cake and
eat it, too: OpenQwaq has a lot of parts, and many of those are
available under other licenses. Squeak is MIT, Tweak (the UI for
OpenQwaq) is MIT, Croquet itself is MIT, Cog is MIT etc. etc. etc.
Thus, in many ways OpenQwaq is very much a "downstream" project that
has lots of inputs.

As a consequence, people who would rather prefer the use of MIT style
licenses can generally contribute to the upstream projects. There is
no need to contribute via GPL terms to OpenQwaq, if your fix is just
as applicable to Squeak and can be contributed there. There is no need
to contribute under GPL terms to OpenQwaq if you have a project that
you can set up as an "upstream" project to OpenQwaq.

The product itself, the OpenQwaq server and client, will be under GPL,
but the code that is used in it may very well be available under other
licenses. In fact, we can set up another upstream contribution project
that will host only contributions to OpenQwaq available under MIT,
just as (for example) Seaside has a repository for code that is
available under (L)GPL. All of this can be worked out.

So let's not get too upset about the license here. There is some
rather good news here, which is that nobody can take away OpenQwaq
from you in the same way that Croquet was taken away from its
community (the single biggest mistake we ever made in commercializing
Croquet). Personally, I'm pretty glad about the license choice and its
implications. In the big picture, this will be good for everyone once
you'll get about the initial disappointment.

Onward and Upward,
- Andreas

[Matthew Fulmer]

On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 12:38:06AM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> That said, I think there is a way by which we can have our cake and
> eat it, too: OpenQwaq has a lot of parts, and many of those are
> available under other licenses. Squeak is MIT, Tweak (the UI for
> OpenQwaq) is MIT, Croquet itself is MIT, Cog is MIT etc. etc. etc.
> Thus, in many ways OpenQwaq is very much a "downstream" project that
> has lots of inputs.

Where would the line be drawn between Croquet and Qwaq Server? I
really want to merge the changes qwaq has made to teatime
(TPluginRouter, TMediaPlugin) with the changes cobalt has made
(router trees, more secure encryption) and release it under an
MIT license on http://www.squeaksource.com/TeaTime.html

--
Matthew Fulmer (a.k.a. Tapple)

[Rich White]

.... Great question Matthew, Im anxious to hear the distinction as well as see what your thinking & doing with this ! ... awesome !

====

--
============================
Richard L. White
Emerging Technologies Researcher/Designer/Developer
Greenbush - Education Service Center
http://www.twitter.com/richwhite
http://labs.greenbush.us

[Andreas Raab]

The line needs to be drawn by not merging bits FROM OpenQwaq INTO
upstream if you want to stay MIT clean. By merging bits FROM OpenQwaq
you are merging with GPL licensed code, which makes the combined work
subject to the restrictions listed explicitly in the GPL.

Cheers,
- Andreas

[Matthew Fulmer]

So, everything in the images in the openqwaq repository is
OpenQwaq and under the GPL license, regardless of whether the
MC package name is Collections, Tweak, Croquet, or Qwaq?

[Andreas Raab]

Unless you have information saying differently, yes. It's better to be
safe rather than sorry, so unless you have a separate source for the
code who can grant a different license you should assume that the code
in the images is GPL.

Cheers,
- Andreas