Let me weigh in from a little different perspective...

The company that I work for is buying into Squeak lock, stock and 
barrel. I did and incredible amount of research into 
languages/platforms with regards to our commercial needs and Squeak 
meets or exceeds our expectations and needs.

We currently have 8+ commercial products and several more that have 
been phased out or are in the development phase... all of the previous 
development has been done in MS Visual Basic and MS Active Server 
Pages. Those products were and are not meeting the needs of the company 
on several levels, most notably:

Code management and reuse/maintainability
Platform support (read non-windows and even capabilities on PocketPC 
platforms)
Stability
Multimedia functionality
Community (with a brain that is)

It has been pointed out that Squeak has some rough edges... I would say 
no more so, even less so, than any commercial system I have used. With 
commercial systems, you are limited to what the vendor has put into 
their product and the community has no say in the direction of that 
product, effectively limiting the audience and innovation in a serious 
way. (Please note that I have never used commercial Smalltalk, Squeak 
is my first and only foray into the Smalltalk world).

(disclaimer: I am a huge Open source advocate and have successfully 
used OS products in major commercial applications in 3 different 
companies.)

In terms of community support, this has got to be the best I've ever 
seen, hands down. In terms of getting specific bits of Squeak polished, 
or adding new functionality to Squeak, as has been stated by Tim 
Blanchard and others, there is a Plethora of highly talented (and I 
mean HIGHLY) designers and programmers that are willing to consult 
regardless of the domain.

We currently have one such person on retainer and have started talking 
to another one about a specific project. So far we are ecstatic.


.... in the end, we have taken a very calculated risk in starting to 
move all of our development to Squeak, but I have less concern for our 
success than at any time in the past :)

... and where else do you get to see Tim Rowledge's sig lines?

Brian