I would like to thank Ken for trying to start a discussion here. In the
previous election, I ended up searching the archives of squeak-dev to
try to get a sense of what some of the candidates were about and found
that some had never posted more than a "me too" just once!

About the SFC, my opinion is the same as Igor's. It is not ideal but we
really have no choice if none of us is going to do all the legal work.

In my opinion, the board has one single authority: the community as a
whole owns the "Squeak" brand and elects this group of people to take
care of it. Anything else is derived from that. Handling money,
technical decisions or whatever else. And signing a contract with the
SFC.

About commercial use, I am fully in favor. Part of that is supporting
users. Our largest group of users right now is the hundreds of thousands
of students and teachers using Etoys. If we were a company, you would
say that the Squeakland foundation is our largest customer. Of course,
if we were a company we would be charging to support them. But to me, it
isn't ethical for us to just drop them because were have been doing it
for free and our resources are limited. Some might claim that it isn't
our fault that somebody else "sold" them Etoys, but in my commercial
efforts I sometimes have to honor other people's promises at my own
expense.

Given that Pharo now exists, I think we can afford to move more slowly.
It is not that I don't want to go where Pharo is going, quite the
opposite. But if they are doing such a good job of supporting one group
of customers (developers like ourselves) then we can focus on another
group until we have more resources.

I would like Squeak 4.1 (or 4.2, as the case may be) to be a small
kernel into which you can load stuff like Etoys and/or Croquet, web
development and email client and so on. All the Squeakland folks would
have to do would be to ship our image preloaded with Etoys 5, Connectors
and DrGeo.

-- Jecel