With this email, I am announcing that I am running for the 2010 Squeak
board. I had considered not doing do due to a potential conflict of
interest (which I will describe below), but then decided that it would
be better to just warn you and let you decide for yourself.

My participation in the Squeak community during the second half of 2009
was limited to some investigations needed for the relicensing effort. I
was busy getting a master's degree, but will put off starting a PhD
program until I can get the following done over the next months:

1) Squeak hardware
2) dual image SqueakNOS
3) manycore Squeak with world image

The third project is the cause of the potential conflict since it can
lead to a fork, so I will go into more detail below. But first I would
like to stress that I am in favor of combining efforts rather than
splitting our already small community. My hope for 2010 is that Etoys 5
can be structured as a layer that can be loaded on top of a bare Squeak
4.1 and that, perhaps, the same will happen with OpenCobalt. I would
love to Squeak to come closer to Cuis and Pharo as well as other
Smalltalks (something I hoped might be possible through the new standard
effort).

Though other board members, both past and present, were far more
envolved with the OLPC project than I ever was, as I said before last
year's election I feel the duty to represent all the people who depend
on Squeak but who don't participate in squeak-dev and so don't vote.
This includes not only all the teachers and students you can meet in the
SqueakFests, but also people doing Seaside or Aida and stuff like that.

I am glad to see Squeak moving forward with Metacello, scripts and other
things like that. At least we will then have something like "yum" or
"apt-get" in Linux. But that is not what the users that I have just
mentioned need. And just putting a pretty face on top of this technology
isn't enough. So project 3 is about changing ObjectMemory so that people
can share stuff in a much more natural way. The details are not
important (see http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5637 if you want to know
more), but the change in image format means a break (like with the
closure thing, but more radical) with the current VMs and images. Anyone
will be free to adopt these changes, of course. But if not, we will have
a fork.

As a developer, I would like to see the code get adopted. As a board
member, I have to vote on what the community in general wants to do. I
feel I can handle the different roles, but it is up to the voters to
decide if they agree.

-- Jecel