Squeak-dev November 1998

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128 participants
265 discussions

Re: Squeak licensing questions [longish]
by russell.allen＠firebirdmedia.com 30 Nov '98

30 Nov '98

On Sat, 28 Nov 1998 20:35:27 -0500: Chris Reuter <cgreuter(a)calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: [cut] >> As an example, what about adding copyright information to classes? Each >> class could have a date, name and a licence number. Every distribution of >> the Squeak core classes could have a document which provides a list of >> licencing options, from GPL to fully commercial. Tools could be provided >> to browse licences etc. > > This smacks of trying to solve a social problem with software. Isn't this what software's for? ;-) But seriously, fixing Squeak might be must simpler and easier then fixing society! > I think a better idea might just be to do what many of the perl folks > do--distribute their modules under the same license as perl itself. > It makes this really easy because everyone knows what the terms of the > license are. > > My suggestion is that that the powers that be consider either > rewriting the squeak license to make it simpler and easier for others > to adopt or to switch to one of the better-known licenses (BSD, > Artistic, GPL with extensions[1]). This would then be the preferred > license for addons. Why restrict ourselves to just one license? Can't Artistic packages live together with commercial packages? Also I am unsure as to what extent Squeak Central can change the licence - see below. > All I would need to do when uploading a goodie is to add the comment, > "released under the XXX license" and everyone who uses it will know > what I mean and won't come under any additional restrictions. I agree - this is like what I was trying to suggest, only with a choice of what licence to put in ëXXX'. [CUT] > >It has been said "Don't worry. Apple has already forgot about it..." in > >terms of the license and its enforcement. However that probably won't > >cut it with IP lawyers of a major corporation. These are sorts of > >questions such a lawyer might ask, and it would be nice to have ready > >answers available for anyone contemplating getting Squeak into their > >organization. > > And, if the day comes that some GiantEvilCorporation [tm] sees Squeak > as a threat to its proprietary products, a flaw in the license could > prove disastrous. Indeed. The licence which is shown at http://squeak.cs.uiuc.edu.au/license.html is a licence given to use/modify/distribute the orginal Apple software - that is the version which Squeak was at when the Squeak team left for Disney (which was that?). (On my reading, before they left, they were adding to the core classes under their employment contracts; now they are creating a derivate work under the license). The license for the last Apple version (apart from disclaimers of liability etc) gave some rights eg: (1) Modified versions of the system could be created, and distributed *provided* that they were distributed under a licence which protected Apple at least as much as the original license, and (2) If the modified version contained "modification, overwrites, replacements, deletions, additions or ports to new platforms of (1) the methods of existing class objects or their existing relationships [?], or (2) any part of the virtual machine" then the modifications etc must be made publically available for free. (3) If you are selling a modified version *you can't include the orginal Apple fonts*. If you are using/adapting a recent version of Squeak then you are *not* using the orginal software, but a modified version (which has been modified by Squeak Central). On my reading, this means that Squeak Central can create a license for the new versions of Squeak, provided that the license: (1) protects Apple's rights/liabilities (2) includes the clause saying that modifications of the orginal classes/VM must be published for free. Because the newer (modified) versions of Squeak have been released under the original Apple licence, I don't know whether the classes which are part of the current distribution, but not part of the Apple distribution, are considered to be "core" classes, so that modifications have to be published. However, these classes have several authors (eg Celeste, File Contents Browser etc), so if they have been released under a "Publish if you Modify" agreement then that license must have been given by the author, not Apple. Yes, this is messy. I think we should clean it up before Squeak starts being pored over by corporate lawyers in Armani suits :-). The Gurus at Squeak Central probably have a better idea of this then I do - in particular Disney Corp may have ideas of their own. Comments anyone? Russell

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Squeak 2.3 beta available
by Dan Ingalls 29 Nov '98

29 Nov '98

Folks - I have just stored a beta version of Squeak 2.3 out on the UIUC server: ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/Smalltalk/Squeak/ A few things to note: This image will want a new VM, although it should run on an old VM if you don't use any of the new pluggable primitives (it may crash if you try). The Mac VM supplied is FAT (will run on 68K machines), but pluggable primitives will fail on the 68K (they should run in Squeak, though). We will complete the 68K section in due time. The image and changes are there as of this msg. The Mac VM (and a compact archive for Macs) should appear in a few hours. There are some awesome new capabilities in this version of Squeak. I'll send out a complete message in the next day or two, and perhaps Andreas will as well (he is responsible for Balloon, the awesome new graphics engine, as well as the considerable interface support surrounding it). [Andreas: Can you send out a brief message pointing folks at some flash files to try, and any other things you might want to suggest for people to try (like the TrueType access or the lightning-fast FFT). Also, if you have a VM for 2.3, where can people find it? Thanks in advance] Enjoy - Dan

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Re: Squeak licensing questions
by russell.allen＠firebirdmedia.com 29 Nov '98

29 Nov '98

>Dear Squeakers, > >I have a few questions about the Squeak license and was wondering if >people on the list could help me out in getting them answered. >Definitive answers from authoritative source are especially welcome, >however general kibitzing would be of interest to me as well, especially >in terms of pointing out questions I haven't thought to ask. I don't have any inside knowledge of the status of Squeak licences, but I am trained in IT law :-) I feel that looking more closely at the licencing issues involved in Squeak may be a very good thing to do, for a few reasons: (1) Open source software in general is coming under greater scrutiny now that commercial enterprises are looking at incorporating it into their products. (2) Copyright law is getting more serious. Criminal offences are increasing, as is the term (US just increased its term to life + 70 years. Think about that - if someone writes a class in their early 20s and lives til they are 85, the source code for that class will be covered by the copyright act for 130 years). Like it or loath it, copyright is here to stay, and projects like Squeak which span the gap between fully commercial software such as Windows and fully GNU- protected software need to put in place mechanisms to avoid conflict, and provide security. However, the modular nature of Squeak should make it very easy create these mechanisms. As an example, what about adding copyright information to classes? Each class could have a date, name and a licence number. Every distribution of the Squeak core classes could have a document which provides a list of licencing options, from GPL to fully commercial. Tools could be provided to browse licences etc. This would enable a commercial distributor to take a Squeak image made up of seperate packages, and browse all of the classes covered by the Gnu license, file them out if necessary. Alternatively, a creator could easily identify the parts of his image which were under commercial copyright and write GNU replacements. Put the licence document on the Swiki, and allow people to add their own licences. This is just an off-the-cuff suggestion which may cause technical/legal/social criticisms (what fun!)... but it's worth considering to save the Squeak community a lot of problems later on. Russell > >It has been said "Don't worry. Apple has already forgot about it..." in >terms of the license and its enforcement. However that probably won't >cut it with IP lawyers of a major corporation. These are sorts of >questions such a lawyer might ask, and it would be nice to have ready >answers available for anyone contemplating getting Squeak into their >organization. > >-Paul Fernhout >Kurtz-Fernhout Software <a href="http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com">http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com</a> >========================================================= >Developers of custom software and educational simulations >Creators of the open source Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator >Creators of the StoryHarp(TM) Audioventure Authoring System > > ------------------------------------------------------------ Russell Allen russell.allen(a)firebirdmedia.com Random Quote: "They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom." Confucius, Analects. ------------------------------------------------------------

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2.3beta: don't hit update.
by Bill Cattey 28 Nov '98

28 Nov '98

Just for fun, I told the 2.3 beta image to perform an update from the net. It went and got all the 2.2 updates since October. I guess this is because the update code is the same in all images, and the expectation is that there will only be one 'true and correct' squeak image out there for updating. This may become problematic if there are to be 2.3 beta updates while 2.2 is still extant, though. -wdc

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Re: Squeak 2.3 beta available
by Andreas Raab 28 Nov '98

28 Nov '98

Hi, > Are there any plans to use TrueType fonts for Squeak in general? That is a difficult question (more than you might expect ;-) For one thing, TrueType fonts are generally not free and we'd need free fonts for shipping them with the base package. Another problem is readability of vector fonts at small sizes. Even though anti-aliasing helps, I personally prefer the bitmap fonts we already have. They're much better to perceive at small sizes. A third thing to keep in mind is that TTFs are pretty expensive to render and caching them can cost a lot of memory. So, I my *personal* feeling about TTFs is that they're very useful as graphical text (the kind you know from vector graphics packages such as CorelDraw or Illustrator) in Morphic but I'm not extremely positive about using vector fonts in general. But we need to try out more things before we can really decide where it's useful and where it isn't. > I have attempted to view the example provided in TTFontReader>>class > exampleString:, but it contains a bug that I am not able to correct. > First, the comment should read: 'TTFontReader exampleString:'Warum?' > not TTFont exampleString:'Warum?' Oops - this method was not at all supposed to be in there. > The error I receive when trying to execute the example is that the > (class?) method default is not understood by TTFontReader. I can not > identify which method should actually be called. If you look closer at the method then you'll that it uses something called "ScheduledControllers activeController view graphicsContext" which is one of my favorite expressions from VisualWorks ;-) So, no, this method doesn't work at all. Andreas -- Linear algebra is your friend - Trigonometry is your enemy. +===== Andreas Raab ============= (raab(a)isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de) =====+ I Department of Simulation and Graphics Phone: +49 391 671 8065 I I University of Magdeburg, Germany Fax: +49 391 671 1164 I +=============< http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~raab >=============+

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Re: Unix sound bug not fixed in 2.3 beta.
by Bill Cattey 28 Nov '98

28 Nov '98

I am confused here. Is the reason you are distributing binaries that have the different definition of FAIL() that you expect a subsequent update to the 2.3 image to have the required "auto-disable-on-primitive-fail" very soon? At this point, I'd favor your distributing interim VM's with the work-around definition of FAIL so that people with UNIX hosts can actually run Squeak 2.3. (The cost is fetching another 150K image.) Am I failing to understand something here? Is it intentional that all UNIX versions of Squeak should randomly hang when the user trips over an object that happens to play a sound? Am I just using Squeak incorrectly? Two out of four systems that I'm running Squeak on are Linux, so I'd be happy to run with a sound-enabled beta. If the only way I'm gonna get a usable 2.3 squeak is to compile it myself, point me at sources that have the Linux sound patches too. -wdc

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Re: Squeak 2.3 beta available
by Chris Double 27 Nov '98

27 Nov '98

> >For those of us who have just learned of Flash, where's a good place to >grab .SWF files? Pop along to an ftp search engine (like http://ftpsearch.lycos.com/) and search for '.swf'. Download one of the many swf files that appear. To play them I used the file list browser and clicked on the .swf file, choosing 'open as flash' from the menu. Chris.

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VM blocking
by Richard L. Peskin 27 Nov '98

27 Nov '98

When I run the following example code (HTTPSocket httpShowGif: 'http://squeak.cs.uiuc.edu/Squeak2.0/midi/Squeakers.GIF'. ) taken from the Squeak 2.2 Mac intro window, I find my VM blocks until the total image is returned. Is this because the VM blocks on the socket primitive calls? --dick peskin ================================= R. L. Peskin, Rutgers Univ. ; <peskin(a)caip.rutgers.edu>; <http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~peskin> VT Phone (802) 824-4558 NJ Phone (732) 445-4208 "The corporate culture is concerned less with Occam's razor than his aftershave lotion."

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Re: Unix sound bug not fixed in 2.3 beta.
by Ian Piumarta 27 Nov '98

27 Nov '98

> Was the fix for the sound start prim supposed to make it into the 2.3 beta? The 2.3beta image does not handle failure of the sound primitives gracefully. As soon as the "auto-disable-on-primitive-fail" is in the image, I'll add primitive failure to the Unix sound stubs. In the meantime, you can do this for yourself by uncommenting the /*success(FALSE)*/ in the #definition of FAIL() near the top of sqUnixSound.c and then recompiling. If there is an overwhelming consensus that the primitive should fail (and hence provoke "a primitive has failed" notifier whenever the image tries to play a sound), then I'll make the change and recompile all the binaries on alix. I await your collective wisdom on the matter... ;-) Regards, Ian

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Faster senders
by sqrmax＠cvtci.com.ar 27 Nov '98

27 Nov '98

Hi. I've improved SystemDictionary>>allCallsOn: by a factor over two, most of it is due to stopping garbage generation and instance creation. This will be most noticeable when deleting methods from a browser. Here's the change set (check the comments in SystemDictionary allCallsOn2:, there's a simple speed check there). Andres. Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="Faster senders.27Nov219am.cs" Content-Disposition: attachment; Filename="Faster senders.27Nov219am.cs" Attachment converted: Anon:Faster senders.27Nov219am.cs (????/----) (0000381C)

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