>>>>> "Oscar" == Oscar Nierstrasz <oscar.nierstrasz at gmail.com> writes:

Oscar> Seriously though.  I consider this the most critical question for the
Oscar> Squeak Foundation.

Oscar> Any ideas?

I think he was spot on.  If you want Squeak to be taken seriously as a
development platform, you need to find people like me who can take an open
source product and provide all the infrastructure around it (tutorials,
courses, books, trainings), and find a way to be financially self-supporting.

For success in the marketplace, you need:

* a stable usable working product
* expectation of responsiveness to bug fixes and enhancement requests
* documentation (user, developer, maintenance)
* after-market support: conferences, trainings, books, tutorials
* consulting and contracting companies
* job boards to indicate a marketplace of human resources
* user groups (real or virtual)
* manager acceptance (requires press releases and other publicity)
* active solicitation of visible large "design wins" (like OLPC and Qwaq)

If Squeak has all that, Squeak will succeed.  Fail any of those,
and Squeak will become "just another interesting project".

By the way, show that as my answer to #11.

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