Jecel>I don't understand - Sun wasn't able to utterly kill Self in 1995
because they *had* previously released it all as open source.

Source code available under an open source license is not the same thing as
"a Squeak-like open source **development project** for the language and
IDE."  In other words, a license is not a project, and a legal document is
not a socio-cultural movement. The availability of the Self source code
never sparked anything resembling the level of enthusiasm or participation
engendered by the release of Squeak.

Squeak was released in late 1996, at a time when there was still a
significant body of Smalltalk practitioners, many of whom at the time were
hungry for a free, open-source Smalltalk implementation (for a variety of
reasons that shouldn't need to be enumerated here.)  Self has never been in
a similar situation.  And regardless of its open-source availability, it has
always been perceived as a research project, not as a production-quality
development platform (regardless of the fact that perception is not always
reality.)

Also, as you yourself surmise, the difficulties involved in porting Self
from the Sun/SPARC platform to other platforms such as the x86 and/or the
Mac probably made no small contribution to the general lack of interest in
Self.

Other factors that may have been important would include a) Self was seen by
the "general public" as a product of Sun, and Java was seen as Sun's "golden
child"--this perception would have damped the enthusiasm of outsiders
regardless of Sun's attitude internally; b) Self is not statically typed; c)
Self syntax does not resemble C syntax; d) the pool of competent Self
programmers has always been far smaller than that of Smalltalk today, let
alone than that of Smalltalk in 1996; e) UML doesn't handle prototype-based
languages well at all (which in my view is a problem with UML, not with
Self); and f) many of those for whom most or all of the previous issues
would have been moot were and are far more interested in languages such as
ML, Sather, Haskel and Scheme.

--Alan