Squeak comes in two pieces: a virtual machine specific to each host, and the Smalltalk sources. The Smalltalk sources come in three files: the image, source, and the change set.

Squeak was initially licensed under the SqL which contains the problematic indemnification clause. These last years, the squeak community led efforts to re-license to a cleaner MIT license.

The Squeak virtual machine

The Squeak VM license has been clarified and it is now packaged for the Debian distribution, in the main branch.

There is now no issue with the Squeak VM.

The Squeak Smalltalk sources

The other relicensing effort concerns the Squeak Smalltalk source. Most of Squeak is written in itself, so this is a rather large part of Squeak. Since 2006, the VPRI and the Squeak community were collecting signed agreements of past contributors.

According to Bert Freudenberg working for VPRI, posting in the OLPC Debian mailing list, VPRI recently took responsibility to relicense the remaining parts:

No. But VPRI as the original authors take responsibility for the earlier contributions made under the Squeak License. VPRI made every justifiable effort to contact the contributors. Not a single contributor was against relicensing, so it is safe to assume that even those that could not be reached would be happy to see their code continue to be used. They submitted it for official inclusion in Squeak, after all. So who would argue that, if not the contributors themselves?

And Kimberly Rose, executive director of VPRI, stated:

VPRI is releasing the code in the etoys.image used on the XO (and on other platforms as can be used) under the MIT license now. This is a non-issue for the XO now. What 'Squeak.org' is doing with their release/download is on a separate track, but I do know they are hard at work to also finish the re-license effort.

If anyone has complaints, speak now, or just go for it!.