Intent to Change License for Squeak 4.0

The Squeak Oversight Board plans to finalize the multi-year effort of re-licensing Squeak. Squeak 4.0 is scheduled to be released on Monday, March 15th, 2010 and will be licensed under the MIT License with some original parts remaining under the Apache License. This release will be functionally equivalent to the previous 3.10.2 release. Current development work will be released as 4.1 as soon as possible following the release of 4.0.

This notice is intended as a “last call” before the actual license change takes effect. We have assembled re-licensing agreements from every identifiable contributor. However, if you have contributed to Squeak or know of someone who has contributed and has not been contacted about the re-licensing effort, this notice is intended to make you aware of the upcoming change and to allow you to contact the Squeak Oversight Board regarding your contributions before the license change takes place.

Please distribute this notice widely. Questions or comments should be sent to relicensing@squeak.org.

2010 Election Announced

The current Election Team Leader, Göran Krampe, has announced the plan and schedule for the election of the 2010 Squeak Oversight Board.  Please read it and be prepared.

Preliminary Agenda for 3/3/2010

Election

Squeak 4.0 and SFC

Free server hosting options

Promotion and Visibility of Squeak

Development Progress

Squeak Swiki Improvement

Meeting Report for 2/17/2010

For the (likely) penultimate meeting of this instance of the Squeak Oversight Board everyone other than Jecel Mattos de Assumpção was present:  Ken Causey, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Andreas Raab, Randal Schwartz, and Igor Stasenko.  Keep your eyes peeled on squeak-dev for announcements related to the upcoming Oversight Board Election.

Our discussions with the Software Freedom Conservancy continues and progress is occurring, if slowly at times.  Right now we are clarifying the exact wording regarding the licensing of the 4.0 release.  Squeak was originally released under a license written by Apple that we refer to as the Squeak License.

In 2006 Apple agreed to relicense the final release of Squeak from Apple (1.1) under the Apple Public Source License.  After further thoughts and discussions this was decided to be a less than optimal choice and Apple agreed to relicense the release, this time under the Apache License.

Since that time work has been going on to solicit agreement from Squeak contributors to relicense all subsequent contributions under the MIT License.  The result now is that parts of the image that are clearly descendants from the 1.1 release are under the Apache License and more recent contributions are under the MIT License.  These two licenses are compatible.

The question is whether we can simply say ‘MIT License’ or have to say something like ‘parts under the Apache License with the remainder under the MIT License’.  We are awaiting guidance from SFC on this issue.  Once we sort that out we will be announcing the intent to officially release a version under the new licensing conditions as widely as possible with the goal of ensuring that all contributors to Squeak are aware of the change.

We spent most of the rest of the meeting discussing trunk work and the possibility of an imminent release.  We are currently thinking of a release in about 2 months if everything goes smoothly.   Expect email from Andreas on squeak-dev soon discussing what needs to be done and soliciting opinions and assistance.

Our next meeting is scheduled for March 3rd, 2010.

Preliminary Agenda for 2/17/2010

Squeak 4.0 and SFC

Free server hosting options

Promotion and Visibility of Squeak

Development Progress

Squeak Swiki Improvement

Meeting Report for 2/3/2010

Once again everyone was present and accounted for today: Jecel Mattos de Assumpção Jr, Ken Causey, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Andreas Raab, Randal Schwartz, and Igor Stasenko.

While we are reviewing other issues are focus right now is primarily on completing the process involved in releasing Squeak 4.0 and joining the Software Freedom Conservancy.  We are still checking facts and looking for possible problems but the chances look good for an imminent (small number of weeks) release.  One aspect of that is actually taking care of the packaging of 4.0 and updating places where the licensing of Squeak is referenced.  Expect a post on squeak-dev soon to discuss this issue and hammer out the details.

We spent much of the rest of the meeting discussing the election process.  Part of our agreement with the SFC specifies how the ‘governing committee’ (AKA Squeak Oversight Board) is formed.  After the retirement of the SqueakPeople website was which was an integral part of forming the voters list for the Oversight Board election the process has temporarily become somewhat informal.  After discussing this in some detail we realized that trying to formalize things a bit more this year would likely just disrupt the upcoming election and so we ultimately decided to set this issue aside for now.  After the election the new Oversight Board and the Election Team should work on this issue with the assistance of the entire community.

Thanks to Chris Cunnington with assistance from others on squeak-dev instructions on how to install Seaside on Squeak were placed on the Squeak website and linked to from the Seaside website.  As a community we fully intend to ensure that Seaside continues to run on Squeak.

Our next meeting is scheduled for 2/17/2010.