(...)
Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)

1. There must be a consensus about what the project is. Meaning: what is squeak? The VM? The VM plus basic image? The VM plus what? Same to croquet and pharo and cuis and...
   
2. At least for the core things belonging to the project, naming conventions and style must be standard.
3. The set of features must be enough to cover the proposed capabilities. I explain: if the proposal is to have an usable general purpose programming environment, then the core features must include file manipulation, network communication, interface with foreign languages, access to system calls, access to devices, etc... And these features must be standard. And these features must be stable.
   
4. There must be documentation (in written form). Documentation must be standardized. Hopping users keep browsing code and figuring out how it work is just not reasonable for something wanted to be widely accepted.
5. At some point in time, "corporate support" becomes necessary. Much of what was put in topics 1 to 4 demands intensive, "semi-skilled" hardworking. Few people engaged in development of new ideas will stop to write manuals or to find a damned error or to put everything "in the standard style". Someone must be hired to do the boring tasks. Besides, as we must have learned from Java and several other real life examples, marketing is necessary: someone must do the press job... someone must print "Squeak for Dummies" books... someone must create courses. Someone must show people "how cool our stuff is". But corporate support won't appear before items 1-5 are accomplished. At a point squeak had a sort of corporate support from Apple and Disney. It was lost.
   

(...)
Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead before it even hit the floor.

There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of Open/Net/FreeBSD":

- Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda. Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.

- Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev list is quieting down and that is a bad sign.

So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland, Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.

IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than OpenBSD.

(...)
Oh, and a final note:

But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what is so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we could do it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something *positive*. The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo.

regards, Göran