Jecel. New forks means that things are alive. Because if there's nobody wants to fork, then it is dead. I don't see any conflicts here, instead i see you found a good way to contribute to the community. We should explore a different ways of improving/evolving the Squeak and smalltalk, and if this means making radical changes, so be it. Who knows, maybe your path will brings us many benefits. And anyways, you can't force people to use your software, be you board member or not. It is always up to their choice :)

On 25 February 2010 20:54, Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel@merlintec.com wrote:

With this email, I am announcing that I am running for the 2010 Squeak board. I had considered not doing do due to a potential conflict of interest (which I will describe below), but then decided that it would be better to just warn you and let you decide for yourself.

My participation in the Squeak community during the second half of 2009 was limited to some investigations needed for the relicensing effort. I was busy getting a master's degree, but will put off starting a PhD program until I can get the following done over the next months:

1. Squeak hardware
2. dual image SqueakNOS
3. manycore Squeak with world image

The third project is the cause of the potential conflict since it can lead to a fork, so I will go into more detail below. But first I would like to stress that I am in favor of combining efforts rather than splitting our already small community. My hope for 2010 is that Etoys 5 can be structured as a layer that can be loaded on top of a bare Squeak 4.1 and that, perhaps, the same will happen with OpenCobalt. I would love to Squeak to come closer to Cuis and Pharo as well as other Smalltalks (something I hoped might be possible through the new standard effort).

Though other board members, both past and present, were far more envolved with the OLPC project than I ever was, as I said before last year's election I feel the duty to represent all the people who depend on Squeak but who don't participate in squeak-dev and so don't vote. This includes not only all the teachers and students you can meet in the SqueakFests, but also people doing Seaside or Aida and stuff like that.

I am glad to see Squeak moving forward with Metacello, scripts and other things like that. At least we will then have something like "yum" or "apt-get" in Linux. But that is not what the users that I have just mentioned need. And just putting a pretty face on top of this technology isn't enough. So project 3 is about changing ObjectMemory so that people can share stuff in a much more natural way. The details are not important (see http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5637 if you want to know more), but the change in image format means a break (like with the closure thing, but more radical) with the current VMs and images. Anyone will be free to adopt these changes, of course. But if not, we will have a fork.

As a developer, I would like to see the code get adopted. As a board member, I have to vote on what the community in general wants to do. I feel I can handle the different roles, but it is up to the voters to decide if they agree.

-- Jecel