<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; ">Igor,</span><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">first let us define some terms.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The Squeak Community</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">===================</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">You and the board appear to define community as "anyone who pipes up on squeak-dev".</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">Now this definition has caused all manner of problems in the past especially with 3.9, and it resulted in the Pharo split, because the 3.9 team were constantly beaten up by people on squeak-dev. (One of those persons doing the beating happened to be Andreas). This definition of community also includes the average "lurker", who may download the image every now and then to see if it is interesting enough for them to not have to do java any more. </div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The "team model" adopted and endorsed by the board for many years, whereby the teams had their discussions on a separate mailing list, specifically afforded a layer of protection from the wide ranging opinions of "lurkers". The flagrant violation of this simple social/political essential layer (which protected Ralph for more than 6 months), is what caused our problems in the first place, when Andreas went to squeak-dev with "this is the new process, I am a board member I can do what I like and I haven't even spoken to the release-team for two months". Andreas was elected on a mandate of helping along a release, and by implication to help along the release-team doing the release. That mandate did not include, using his position on the board to promote his own interests, and that of his company, over that of the communities interests, which I shall outline below.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">My definition of "community" is, the body of individuals who have significant code bases built on squeak or squeak like base images, who are tasked with the problem of maintaining packages, for users who are using an ever increasing variety of tools and forks of squeak. My definition of "community" includes all pharo developers, pharo users, cuis developers, and cuis users, cobalt, croquet, etoys, gjallar the lot. For example, I consider Göran, who is tasked with the maintenance of Gjallar, to be the archetypal, community member, whose needs bear understanding and supporting.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">So the "lurkers" who download an image occasionally, they pop up on squeak-dev and see "nothing appears to have changed in 4 years". These are the ones that panicked the board, people I had never heard of, and as far as I know had no commits to any current projects i.e. they aren't really part of the community.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The "community" who have actual code running, have seen that the range of tools they can use to make their job easier to move their code about, to test it and to deploy their code for different clients has steadily increased and improved over the past 4 years. Now we have package management systems, improved testing tools (TestReporter), improved MC, Logging, Rio, Sake, Bob, AtomicLoading, Installer, and LPF *** running in all base images.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The Vision</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">=========</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The "lurkers" just want to see a new flashy image, that they might try a little project in one day.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The "community" want to see the board provide vision and to promote harmony both philosophically/ideologically, and with technical facilities; harmony among all squeak forks, even those who don't want to be harmonised (i.e. Pharo). The community members want to be able to publish a package (e.g. Magma) and have it be tested to work for everyone, whether they be pharo users or squeak users. The community wants to be able keep its large published, even deployed code bases up to date and bug free.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">This means that "the community" don't want yet another fork to support, the communities enthusiasm for "yet more of the same" waned when pharo forked, and no one wanted to volunteer for 3.11 after 3.10. To be honest we were all too busy just keeping our own code bases running, to have to worry about another fork of squeak.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">In anticipation of spoon aka squeak 5.0, those of us with big code bases are already anticipating a significant porting effort in the future, we don't want to have another one foisted on us every 6 months.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">Where are we now</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">==============</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The board has responsibility to the community, the whole community, and I don't just limit that to squeak users.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">This means that the board needs to set and understand its terms of engagement, that it is here to provide an "older and wiser supervisory" service different branches of the community, to foster an inclusive "culture" around which interesting innovations and solutions can happen.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">It is not here to promote the interests of Andreas, and his company in the following:</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">1. Producing yet another fork for its own sake, "fork de andreas", and calling it squeak - is not in the interests of the community.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">2. Undermining the existing common tools and the progress made, in the past 3 years by the community*** </div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">3. Orphaning existing code bases, not providing any fixes to us, or a migration path.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">4. Ignoring users of other forks, and users trapped by inertia in past squeak releases.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">My Personal Situation</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">=================</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">I was funded in part to work on squeak, because my vision aimed to provide tools as a means to harness the creativity of the whole community. This was considered a benefit to both myself and my clients, and my paying clients considered it a bonus to be able to contribute back to the OSS community, from which we also derive great benefits. The vision provided a suite of tools we could use to build and test our production images, and our code base would be able to track the latest developments from whatever source.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The board scuppered all of the above, and the reputation of squeak as a viable solution that is worth contributing back to (i.e and funding!!!!) has been irreparably damaged. So thanks the incompetent fly by the seat of their pants flailings of the board, I loose a small but significant income stream that took several years to build up.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">We also believed that modelling an extreme programming approach to testing and releasing, with a goal of bi-monthly releases, would be of value to the community and our own projects. (we would be on squeak 3.14-alpha by now, if Andreas had put his considerable skills to contributing to the release team's work, rather than replacing it)</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The fact that the actions of the board, have allowed an individual to take over, without due process, for his own benefit, following the agenda of his company, while at the same time, causing problems for others, is an issue of serious concern that the board should take seriously, and is not. It is the board that is going around in circles, refusing to take the "terms of engagement" request seriously.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">I have no use for Multimedia tools in squeak or half of Andreas' ideas, I don't even know or care what they are, and I doubt if Göran gjallar (a project management tool using seaside and magma) has much use for them either. These are loadable things, that should be provided in external packages (again for all base images), Andreas should go off and become a contributing member of the community first before presuming to run it. How many loadable packages are on squeaksource provided and maintained by Andreas, if the answer is none, then he is not really a contributing member of the community, he is merely an informed user, aka lurker. Why would his opinion on a package management solution for the community to use be relevant, if he doesn't have any packages? Andreas develops using a "monolithic image under his control", so effectively do the Pharo team members, yet we, the community had a professed goal of moving towards a kernel image with load-able packages.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">I myself made a specific decision NOT to run for the board (though I was asked), because I didn't see any purpose for a board member to be both on the board and on the release team, after all the board had endorsed the release team and therefore had a DUTY to uphold it as a decision making entity in its own right. The release-team has the authority to decide what is in the release, not the board, since that is what the board appointed the release team to do.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">Andreas however joined the board specifically as a ploy to mussel through his own agenda which is to release a new image. No mention of the cultural context in which we are all operating, and those of us who are "the community" of package developers, are offered nothing from this new deal.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The core image, as a practical artefact, is the least important part of providing a service to clients, having it change underneath you however, is a big problem. The important part is the code you develop, maintaining it and testing it.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">Although "Fork de Andreas", has not adopted LPF, Sake/Packages, Installer, this is not a problem as long as it doesn't break them. However Andreas has actually undermined and broken the use of MANTIS as THE tool for documenting bugs, and providing fixes for us legacy users. Because trunk is a moving target, people are fixing bugs against the moving target, not against releases. This is a change of policy which is not in the interests of the community, and hasn't even been discussed. Bug fixes are not maintained for existing users any more, nor can you provide them to existing users any more. Sake/Packages can include a bug fix with a package if it is needed. BUT that bug fix has to be published relative to a fixed point, i.e. a release. Throwing fixes willy-nilly into trunk, doesn't help anyone. We had a golden age in which you could load any bug fix you needed direct form Mantis, well now no one is providing fixes there any more. You are forced to use trunk to avail yourself of important fixes, but trunk is a moving target and is pre-release.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The Boards Job</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">============</div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The board's job is to consider the following points, and to provide a visionary direction as a solution to the community: </div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">1) My own code base is now orphaned and there is no suitable base image upon which to build, beyond 3.10. I was going to use Pharo, but I find OmniBrowser unusable, and the image is hugely bloated. </div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">The trunk based 3.11 will not come tested, it will not come with package management, I will have to port all my own tools, and my own code, I will have to manually regression test seaside, magritte, pier, Rio, Beach etc, and some 60 packages, against the release. Andreas will not do that for me (whereas Bob would have done). The Bob/LPF process enabled me to apply API fixes to legacy images, and so enables a smooth migration path to any new releases.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">2) The pain of maintaining my existing 14 or so packages for all forks is getting progressively harder not easier, to the extent that the inability of getting anyone to work together at all is making continued community based development prohibitive.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">3) The board's ability to make any decisions whatsoever has been undermined, since it cannot be trusted to support its own decisions, or even to use due-process for anything it does. Thus the board has become THE loose cannon, that it was created to stabilise through the application of diverse elected wisdom. The process of election, which was intended to enable the board to be a source of wisdom, and to be representative of the communities interests, has become the potential source of unpredictable insensitive and partisan disruption.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">4) If the board did not exist, or remained as a low key background entity looking after servers, then the community would have a chance to work things out in a process of mutual collaboration. The heavy handed actions of the board, now ensure that for groups sharing common interests, forking, in order to get away form the potential disruption that the board may cause, is the only viable option. This is the opposite of what the community wants.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">5) The facilities of the community, can be removed, or re-assigned without due process. Thus scuppering all work done by users of those facilities. I spent a lot of effort building tools for mantis, that would enable mantis to be used as part of the process, effectively. But now Mantis and mantis harvesters have been reassigned to a different purpose. For example, I cant deliver my 3.11 even if I wanted to, because it was bound to and intended to showcase a process and that process included the way mantis was used to collate, query, and manage bugs, in a professional manner for the foreseeable future. Andreas replaced the process with his "New process for contributing to squeak", in ONE email, with NO discussion.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">6) Does the board even have a constitution? This email includes the announcement that my teddy bear Cyril is running for the board, in the upcoming elections.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">So in conclusion, until the Board, defines what it means by the community, and what it means to be itself, I don't think the community is really able to function. </div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">I have repeatedly asked the board to produce a simple little thing such as a "Terms of Reference", 6 months of complete in-action on this topic, leads me to feel that I would be within my rights to call for resignations.</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">I am not going in circles Igor, I stated my position clearly at the beginning and I haven't changed. "I will not contribute any further to squeak, until the board has some form of terms of reference, which protects anyone from going through what I went through in the future."</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">regards</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; ">Keith</div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "> </div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 17px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 15px; "><br></div></body></html>