[Squeakfoundation]Nudge, nudge!

[Paul McDonough]

Hear, hear! with Tim.

I'm not contributing jack to this discussion or effort thus far; but
once I can bring some "situations" under control, I hope to be more
active.  So that's by way of saying, I probably don't have enough
context to be butting in, but I'll do so anyway ...

1.  The StableSqueak effort and the main SqC thrust can reinforce one
another, to great mutual benefit.  Think not of a fork, but rather of
interweaving strands, like those pop-drawings of DNA.

2.  Without the pink plane, the blue plane soars off into a never-never
land which has little or no impact on the world outside its own creative
minds.  Without the blue plane, the pink plane becomes a dreadful,
lifeless, stale, hopeless place of dark, smelly alleys and tumbleweed,
and nowhere to work but Microsoft.

3.  Pardon while I yell out the name of the 400-lb. gorilla at the
table.  "Money".  Imho, this Squeak Foundation is rolling along pretty
well, actually - if you've ever tried to put togethor the neighborhood
school-bake-sale or something, you know it's not easy to get a volunteer
effort moving quickly.  Cees et al. are doing a lot, and being quite
effective.  But to do a job on the scale that's being talked about,
there must be money, or a critical mass of people with sufficient
leisure to devote essentially full time.

One way to fund a foundation is through corporate sponsorship.  Squeak
has plenty of allure, but few delivered "success stories" - and without
the success stories, corporate donors become more difficult to convince.
 So that's where StSq comes back in.  The idea behind that effort, as I
understand it, was not to supercede Squeak itself, but to provide a
steady, backward-compatible, solid platform to allow one to take
advantage of Squeak's best developed features, but without having to
know all that much about its internal workings, and without the highly
interwoven nature that makes such things as headless apps pretty tricky
to put together.  That's what led me to volunteer to play with the
pre-release image (good schtuff!, albeit still a ways to go).

It is my belief that once such a platform becomes available, the sheer
brute force of economic opportunity is going to push *someone* to use
Squeak to make a buck.  That someone, if s/he has the least grain of
sense at all, will recognize the value of contributing to efforts such
as StSq, SqF, and Squeak Central, in their preferred currency, be it
cash, time, or code.  In that slice of the business community which has
thought about how to build open-source based businesses, Rule Number Two
is taken as a given:  always give back to the community!  And then the
community becomes stronger, there's more time/effort available for
Squeaking along all planes, more Squeak jobs out there, and it all loops
back.  That's my hope, anyway, as I really want to see Squeak go where
we all know it can go.

Just my 2 cents,
Paul

(ps - Rule Number One:  "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."  cf. Wayne/Garth.)

Tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> Dwight Hughes <dwighth@ipa.net> is widely believed to have written:
> 
> > At 01:41 AM 05/11/2001, Andreas Rabb wrote:
> > >And reporting about progress will help avoid the Stable Squeak mistake
> > >of being some mystical secret society where (except from a few initiated)
> > >nobody knows what's going on.
> >
> > I think there is also a general perception on the Squeak List that
> > SqF==StableSqueak.
> Then we should stomp on that asap. I was going to point to the
> foundation webpage to illustrate by referring to the statement of
> purpose, but it isn't there - the webpage I mean! Cees, perhaps you
> could do a little page with a summary of things 'decided' so far on it?
> 
> > For myself, I would be quite hostile if I saw SqF heading in any direction
> > that would divert the main thrust of Squeak development away from the blue
> > plane.
> I think we've agreed that the key job is to encourage and support _all_
> efforts relating to squeak, whether they be tedious money grubber
> oriented pink plane stuff or soaring delights of blue. It should all be
> in the archives I think.
> 
> tim
> 
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Strange OpCodes: APX: Apply Power and eXplode
> 
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