Hi Jeremy, good to hear that Cincom Smalltalk is available for personal use again! However, there are three rules in the Personal Use License which make it impossible to use CST for developing or maintaining any non-profit open source project like JNIPort. I am sure that Cincom’s legal department has all the best intentions to protect Cincom’s intellectual property. However, what’s Cincom’s position regarding non-profit open source projects? Should the developers contact Cincom to get an individual permission to use Cincom Smalltalk for the project, or are they supposed to buy a commercial license if they don’t already have one? This is the rule which explicitly forbids open source development under the PUL, and there are no exemptions in the license text: „1.6 … Any code, components or software developed using the Product under this license must remain strictly for Your personal use.“ This clearly prohibits to use CST for developing anything which is published in any form and for any purpose, including contributions to CST. The next one even prohibits the use of CST for just reviewing or debugging code of someone else’s open source project and telling the author about your findings: „1.3 … You may not use the Product to … support any external projects, regardless of whether compensation is involved.“ And this one makes it complicated to use common Smalltalk development practices in an open source project: „1.6 … If any portion of the Product is provided in source code form, You may view, study and modify such code solely for personal, non-commercial exploration or experimentation on Your local devices. You may not: (i) publish or share the source code or any modifications; (ii) upload it to any public or private repository (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket); (iii) include it in any project, product or system intended for commercial use or distribution; or (iv) use it to create derivative works that are shared, sublicensed or deployed outside of Your own private use.“ It is often necessary to override a method by implementing a modified version of the method in a subclass, or directly override a method in an existing class (although I avoid that if I can). However, such a method can’t be included in an open source project, as this is not „for personal, non-commercial exploration or experimentation on Your local devices“, and it is not allowed to publish such code „to any public or private repository“. Which by the way also excludes the Cincom Public Repository. Best regards Joachim Geidel
Am 08.10.2025 um 18:16 schrieb Jordan, Jeremy <JJordan@cincom.com>:
Yes, Colin! You are correct and we are very excited to announce PUL 9! In case any of you aren't on the Cincom Smalltalk Digest newsletter subscription, here's the announcement we put out on Tuesday of last week:
PUL 9: A Giant Leap Forward: Now Compatible with macOS!
Cincom is excited to announce PUL 9, a groundbreaking upgrade that brings full macOS compatibility to our personal use non-commercial license version that empowers developers to build and maintain applications seamlessly across platforms.