Hi!

(still cross posting, hope you don't mind)

Gary Dunn wrote:
> I am new here and not really qualified to comment on this issue. Please
> take my input as having good intentions. Specifically, I do not want to
> start a flame war over the pros and cons of various projects.

Nah, we don't do flame wars in the Squeak community. Well, not bad ones 
at least :)

> There is much to learn from the history of the BSD community.
> (Disclaimer: I am a huge fan of FreeBSD.) The FreeBSD project began with
> the goal of creating an open-source OS for Intel i386 hardware that was
> as faithful as possible to BSD Unix. In time the developers were going
> in three directions. One group wanted high performance, a second wanted
> portability to every possible platform, and a third wanted high
> reliability and security. There were also the usual personality
> conflicts and differing opinions on how to manage the project.
> Eventually it forked, twice, giving us FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
> Each has its own personality, its own strengths. The good news is they
> cross-pollinate each other.

Yeah, that would be a positive future. And I have in fact earlier 
strongly advocated the fact that we need to "live with forks" because we 
already have several of them (like Croquet, OLPC etc).

But see below...

[SNIP]
> It looks to me like Pharo is a Smalltalk for building grown-up apps.
> Very much like the Smalltalk I began with, which produced apps with the
> look and feel of the host Microsoft Windows. I think there is a need for
> that. I take it Pharo is new, and as such it has been luring developers
> away from Squeak. The potential for good in this outweighs whatever the
> negative consequences may be, because, like the BSDs, the Squeak
> developers can always pull in what they like from Pharo.

In a "perfect world", yes. I even started the DeltaStreams project with 
these cross pollination scenarios in my head.

> Do not confuse a fork with a divorce. Think of it as mitosis. The more
> the merrier.

Yes, that is also the way I have argued about it. See:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-August/119471.html

> I believe that the impact of Squeak on education has yet to be realized.
> The necessary hardware -- the visionary Dynabook -- is just appearing.
> It will be years before there are enough skilled teachers for the
> critical mass required for the paradigm shift to occur. And there is the
> culture change, so difficult in a field as institutionalized as modern
> education. What we have been seeing are the Smalltalk explorers and
> trail blazers, the pioneers to whom we will someday owe an enormous debt
> of gratitude.

Possibly true, but Smalltalk, Squeak, Etoys and even Croquet have been 
around for quite some time now - and we haven't seen any real explosion 
yet. Croquet was meant to "explode" but hasn't. So I am not holding my 
breath for "the day Squeak gets popular" :)

> I am in no position to recommend anything here, but I will just the
> same. Please forgive me. I recommend that Squeak not be killed off, or
> merged. Let the fork live on.

Nothing to forgive, I want to hear lots of opinions in order for me to 
personally form an opinion about the idea. The "view" you present above 
is a positive one of a forked world. The reality can be harsher:

Take XFree86 vs XOrg for example. The history there is complicated but 
the fact remains - XOrg started, added lots of "cool features" quickly 
while XFree86 stood still, then when the developers started heavily 
voting with their feet the distros also switched and XFree86 was dead 
before it even hit the floor.

There are mainly two aspects here that tells me that the above "bad 
future of XFree86" is more likely to happen than the "good future of 
Open/Net/FreeBSD":

- Pharo may "sound" like it has a different agenda than Squeak.org but 
IMO the large majority of Squeak.org developers share the Pharo agenda. 
Thus the differentiation is not there. Most people will just pick the 
one with the most momentum, and that is Pharo.

- Squeak.org is standing still. Sure, there are things being done by 
some people, no doubt about that. But perception is *everything* and 
from the outside it seems to be standing still. Even the squeak-dev list 
is quieting down and that is a bad sign.


So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being a 
"Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland, 
Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.

IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as is 
Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or "Smalltalk, 
with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much more than OpenBSD.

> I cannot close without saying that "Phreak" would be a very bad name :-)

Again, I wasn't even advocating a name change - although a name change 
may be a good thing if we would merge. Also, I hate to say it, but 
"Pharo" sucks pretty bad too I think, and you guys STILL have attracted 
lots of developers :) :)

Oh, and a final note:

But what if Squeak.org is abandoned and everyone moves to Pharo, what is 
so bad about letting that happen? It is NOT bad. But I think we could do 
it in a smoother way and actually turn this into something *positive*. 
The merge could be turned into a real BOOST to Squeak/Pharo.

regards, Göran