I'm not an old and may be not representative member (I'm french you 
know) but I think that:

	- this would be great to be able to buy a squeak distro with all the 
packages...
	I discussed with kim and she said that squeakland people would love to 
see that happening and that
	they would not have any problem if someone would make money selling 
squeak distro since it would give 	a professional flavor to squeak. 
(any taker? you could reuse what we did via esug cd and marcus dvd)

	- I always said to avi for example that I would love to be able to pay 
him something like 100$ a year (this is not too 	much but if we are 50 
this starts to count. Because of course I could help improve MC but may 
be I'm not good
	enough or too busy creating the new generation of cool stuff and money 
represents my agreement that something is 	valuable. So I would love to 
be able to spend our money into the software that I use the most and 
this way contribute 	to the wealth of the people that are helping my 
life. Because if you receive money for something you will be inclined
	to make it better. and only people willing to pay can pay and other 
just use it.

	- We have been discussing about creating a real structure to gather 
money so that the web site looks
	more as a cool and professional one (and other stuff). Because certain 
people (and even researchers) have problems
	when they said that they use Squeak (even us with all our cool 
papers). So it occurred to us that
	if Squeak would have a 2005 looking website (like the one of mozilla 
for example). Then suddenly
	without changing anything else we would be doing something much cooler 
(programming in Squeak).
	This may be naive but I know some guys trying to work professionally 
with Squeak that avoid to
	point their clients to  www.squeak.org because this could be a way to 
lose them.

Stef
		


On 16 déc. 04, at 22:37, Michael Latta wrote:

> This brings up something I was thinking about recently.  Is it kosher 
> to charge for enhancements to Squeak?  Even if you adhere to the 
> letter of the license, is it socially acceptable to this community.  
> What if the next release of MC cost $5, what if a JIT cost $25.  By 
> the time you purchased various pieces you would be into real money.  
> On the other hand money motivates.  But, given all the work already 
> placed in Squeak, can the late-comers ask for money given what they 
> are receiving already there in the community?  Many contributions may 
> come from funded research, where this is not an issue.  I would like 
> to know what some old and new members think.
>
> Michael
>
> On Dec 16, 2004, at 12:46 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:
>
>> Have you tried to set up a collect?
>> How much money do you think would help to boost it?
>>
>> Stef
>>
>>> Michael Latta writes:
>>>> What is the status of any effort to implement a JIT or other 
>>>> compiler
>>>> from bytecode to native execution?
>>>
>>> I'm working on a JIT like project called Exupery. Currently it's 10%
>>> slower than VW for the bytecode benchmark. Hopefully it will be 
>>> faster
>>> in about a month. (VW is much faster for sends but I haven't yet
>>> started optimising them.)
>>>
>>> The compiler is written in Smalltalk. It's uncommented but there are
>>> a lot of tests.
>>>
>>> Lyndon is investigating a Windows port. There is also people
>>> interested in porting to the PPC.
>>>
>>> It's just a lot of work and there are only so many weekends per
>>> week. With funding work would go a lot faster.
>>>
>>> Bryce
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>