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FAQ: Licenses
Last updated at 6:17 pm UTC on 31 October 2006

The license governing Squeak is called Squeak-L. There's a ton of info on that page.




Old Contents of this Page


License Problems



Intro

I'm (Stephan Rudlof) missing an understandable summary of license conditions for Squeakers which are walkers between the commercial and noncommercial worlds.


My motivation

I'm planning to write a Go-program and think of using Squeak to do this.
I think that such a project results in some open source stuff. But on the other side it would be interesting for me to have the - theoretical - possibility to sell a potentially good Go-program with some parts not under open source. I know that writing a Go-program is a very ambitious task, but it's a very interesting project. A dream of mine is to earn my money with it...
In the mailing list archive I've found different opinions about the risk of using Squeak for commercial purposes. It is not clear how to achieve a correct division into open source and commercial parts. There are some ideas and conjectures, but also a lack of facts!
  • To read:

  • email about Squeak and Debian. In summary, the indemnification clause is worded in a worrisome way.
  • Stephan Rudlof: Squeak compared to GPL and/or OpenBSD


    Are fonts critical?

    In my opinion the passage concerning fonts in Exhibit A of the license could be critical: If all squeak programs are treaten as "Changed Software" then the Apple fonts are not useable, but how to replace them with another one?
    Think of a commercial part consisting of separate or derived classes - not mixed with Squeak classes! - working together with a changed version of Squeak which is made public. Then a simple Transcript message uses the Fonts.
    Or imagine the program has only a visual GUI and seems to be working, then after selling a few programs a *bug* arises and pops up a DEBUG window with *Apple Fonts*! At this point the program becomes illegal...
    There was a discussion over licensing fonts at the Squeak Mailing Lists, which shows that the problems are far from trivial in this field...
    A newer mail snipped regarding licences and true type fonts 12 Dec 1999: True Type Fonts from Alan Kay.

    Answers