On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Göran Krampe <goran at krampe.se> wrote:


> I definitely agree with the friendly part. That is something I have always
> been proud of - the friendliness of our community.
>
> Nevertheless I am still worried that Squeak.org is being starved. It would
> be interesting to hear views/ideas from the board (and others) on this, and
> possible ways to adapt to it.
>

Well, there's no doubt that the community forked along with the code. There
are a few people who contribute to both Pharo and Squeak, but not a lot.
This leads to both communities being smaller, although you don't notice
that with Pharo.


> Earlier Seaside and web development has been a "driver" behind the
> community - the fact that if you build web apps, it doesn't matter how the
> backend "looks" (thus the UI of Squeak was of no importance).
>

Well, I'm still using Squeak for web development. Sure, most of the web dev
crowd has moved to Pharo, but Squeak is still a good platform for the web.


> These days I am unsure of Squeak's "place" in the world.
>

On of the effects of the fork has been to reduce the pressure on us, in the
Squeak community, to make releases with big new features or invasive
"cleaning". That, in turn has allowed us to focus on fundamentals that
aren't flashy, but are important to advancing the platform. A lot of our
work in the past couple of years has been around forging better links with
other forks of Squeak, oddly enough.

Along with VRPI, we did the legwork to make the MIT relicensing happen. We
merged in code from the Cuis, Teleplace, and Etoys forks, both to improve
Squeak and to make it more compatible with those variants. Recently we've
been working on fixing compatibility issues with the Scratch fork so that
it can continue to work even though the new version of Scratch will be
based on Flash.

One of the effects of our continued collaboration with the Etoys community
has been to strengthen our ties with the wider world of open source. Many
Linux distributions now include Squeak packages. Randall has been giving
talks about Squeak in more "mainstream" fora dedicated to Linux and Perl.

So what's Squeak's place in the world? I'm not sure either, to tell the
truth. It's changing, and the Pharo fork has had a lot to do with that. But
I like the direction we're taking and a look forward to seeing where we end
up.

Colin
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