"Andrew C. Greenberg" wrote:
> 
> At 4:28 PM -0600 3/9/01, Bob Hartwig wrote:
> >At 04:04 PM 3/9/2001 -0500, you wrote:
> >>I think that the opensource vm and the very portable
> >approach/implementation are
> >>very strong attractions in themselves for people who want to do
> >>industrial-strength Smalltalk or other non-multimedia things. You don't find
> >>these in other dialects AFAIK.
> >
> >FWIW, this is my view also.  The complete openness of the system makes it
> >too attractive to dismiss out of hand.  *BUT* that means that a fork for a
> >project like Stable Squeak is probably necessary.
> 
> The part of your argument I missed is the "why."

In my opinion, a forked version of Squeak is probably necessary for industrial-strength/commercial/etc work *IF* for whatever reason SqC decides to never make the standard release modular.  (I think that's a big "if"... there seem to be hints that SqC is addressing this gradually.)

On the other hand, if the standard Squeak release is made to be modular at some point (which I hope is more likely), I don't think a major fork would really be needed.  There might be "forks" of a few parts (modules?) of the release (such as UI components), but commercial Squeak apps could hopefully always be based on a "kernel" and other core parts of official SqC releases.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com