2009/7/1 Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>:

Hello Bert!

It is truly beautiful to see your devotion to a vision. I respect
that. The problem has never been eToys or even this vision.

The overall considerations should remind us the extremely limited
resources our community has, going smaller and smaller as people move
to forks, and that it struggles attracting new members. Focusing on
children at this point would be a terrible mistake, IMHO.

Which part of limited resources don't you understand? Why can't we
just have a great system rather than focusing on
yet-another-killer-app? Let eToys be eToys and let Squeak be Squeak.

Igor said, I think, that eToys can be a package on top of Squeak. It
should be perfectly fine for everybody.

Let me also speak from the heart, Bert. I have been introduced to
Squeak around 2001. There is no contribution from me and I could never
manage to do anything more than prototypes in Squeak. As I grow older,
and the experience kicks in, I realize that several requirements have
to be met in order to make it possible for me to use Squeak.

How come it is so easy to develop prototypes in Squeak but then it
feels flat when it's time to do the real thing? Who can afford to
develop not reusable prototypes nowadays? I certainly cannot! When
it's time to wrap up Squeak into a product and deploy it, it turns out
bitter. It always translates as real deep hard work and possibly more
than the initial project.

I dream about using Squeak for my projects. My bread and butter is
about designing projects and I have thousands of pages about ideas
over the last 13 years. I still hardly can fit Squeak in that. Squeak
is a designer's dream! But it's a business nightmare. What the heck!
Even the wonderful seaside wouldn't be an option, why should I retrain
my staff who already know, say, Ruby, to use the unapproachable,
weird, childish Squeak when there is Ruby on Rails? I don't have that
kind of money to spare on a bet.

That is the reality of small businesses in North America. Thank you
for your consideration.

You want eToys? Get on board with eToys. The visionary people have
left the building. The truth is that by leaving Squeak, the great
minds have made a self admission, a confession, that Squeak was no
longer a vision (but, perhaps, the concretization of a vision), and
they have moved on another vision... something related to the far
fetched future. We should understand what has happened, embrace the
reality and also move on to something more tengible for us in the near
future.

Finally, your contribution to Squeak has been noticed over the years
and you're much more important to the community than I am. HOWEVER, I
might never be able to seriously use Squeak and contribute to the
community if I do not speak up right now... while the community is
listening. It is my sincere wish to use Squeak on professional basis.

Best regards,
Ian

-- 
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/