[Vm-dev] ECOOP 2022: Call for Papers

[Stéphane Rollandin]

As an independent developer, I reckoned I could give some feedback about 
how it feels to read a Call for Papers like this one.

I have nearly twenty years of work with Squeak behind me. I developed an 
original framework for music composition, with brand new techniques and 
domain modelling architectures. I used it to produce about 70 pieces of 
music. I made a modular Lisp interpreter, a DSL for functional 
programming in Smalltalk, several games and a game engine with its own 
original brand of component-based architecture for autonomous agents. 
All of this is freely available and open-sourced [1].

Now I would be very glad to be solicited for introducing, documenting 
and elaborating on what, among all the above, may be of interest to 
others. But not on my spare time - that time, I use it for fun, that is, 
actually doing the stuff.

When I read the Call for Papers which, I know, is not meant for 
unaffiliated people like me, what I feel is: WTF?

Here I am asked to do some more work, with hard deadlines and very 
specific contraints, just to get a chance to have my research published 
in non-open, expensive journals that nobody among the people I would 
like to reach will ever read.

This work is ordered to me like a school assignment, with no detectable 
sign of respect for the independent mindset required to explore new 
venues, that is, not detectable sign of respect for the human being 
behind the research. Actually I feel offended just by the tone of that 
Call from Above, as it seems, which makes me feel like I should only be 
glad to have been given a chance to exist in the eye of the Man.

And of course, all this I am supposed to do for nilch.

Having read countless papers and theses in my domains of research, I 
have no hesitation to claim that I have a lot of material to provide, 
enough for a thesis or two in fact, and of course for many papers. I 
will never do this for free though - because fun is fun, and work is work.

So I am asking myself, and also asking you people BTW: is there another, 
more human, more respectul, and maybe even rewarding, way to have one's 
own research be known in the large?

Stef


[1] http://www.zogotounga.net/comp/eindex.html