Squeakfoundation January 2002

squeakfoundation@lists.squeakfoundation.org

33 participants
38 discussions

re: licensing issues
by Mark Mullin 28 Jan '02

28 Jan '02

Paul Fernhout and others have addressed this issue pretty thoroughly, I'd just throw out a couple of tactical issues that I think reduce the scope of the problem. Licensing is primarily a tool to make sure credit flows where it is due, and control doesn't evaporate like a summer dew. People use licensed technologies because the cost of using the technology is lower than the cost of solving the problem without using the technology. This fundamental reasoning I would argue applies equally to the kid with the overclocked athalon running linux as it does to a server farm with 1K Sun boxes in it. Licensed technologies continue to be used because they provide a benefit, and they need to maintain a certain level of consistency to provide that benefit. Without "knowing" that I at least am starting with a squeak image blessed by a number of specialists, I really don't have a prayer. I believe that a means for classifying a relevant subset of our potential community would be; Condition 1 Do they modify Squeak ? Do they modify classes used by the community at large ? Do they modify the underlying system ? Condition 2 Do they wrap squeak in their application, or is their application wrapped in squeak ? Squeak is an open environment that provides a metaphor that works all the way to the desktop. It's fundamentally free, it's really really pretty, and I have accidentally created a bunch of squeak users myself in the last month just by showing it to them. Basically, if you can use excel or a tool of similar complexity, you can switch to squeak as your desktop. Unless you're an academic researcher or a dot bomb that still has money, it's simply not in your best interests to subsume Squeak, i.e. to package the system inside another application. You loose a whole mess of leverage, and the whole idea of interacting with other peoples "components" gets a lot more problematic. And you just buried a whole mass of very cryptic oop engine code in your source tree. So, if you're a researcher and we're talking visions of a future computing environment, have at it. If you're in the latter case, why don't you be nice and let your investors have your money back before you loose it all ? Read the doco on plugins before you decide to take one of the worlds uglier case statements under your wing as your own problem. So I'd argue that 1) It is right and just for a baseline distribution of squeak to exist, sanctioned by some type of official organization, and controlled by that organization. You can't make something else and call it official and you can't take the official baseline, call it yours, and then sell it. Users that modify public squeak classes for fun need to submit them if they want them to be official, and maybe those that want to sell commercial classes on top of squeak could donate ? In the latter case, the organization should have the ability to (within scrutinized reason) sell an official "Squeak Ready" logo to commercial providers. (Right does not neccessarily == willingness to do so) 2) If you wire your application like spagetti into squeak PLATFORM code, you're nutso. You've also got a nasty copyright problem, as you do not own the original work. Built in primitives do not make you nutso. Files that contain your own intellectual property remain that, even if linked statically or dynamically with squeak. Distributing them is your own problem, making them compatible with the baseline release is your problem. In fact, everything is your problem but the ability to download the latest blessed sources for platform builds. (I admit to extreme bias here, I'm trying to connect a virtual reality engine to squeak, not give it away). 3) Your sqeak application code remains your own, although a system like squeak makes protecting the source somewhat problematic. Changes you make to public community classes become public community property iff you submit them for consideration/inclusion in the baseline. Source-less changes to public classes will annoy the hell out of many users. Commercial and non profit users could use this structure to submit fixes/improvements to the fundamental platform layers and squeak code and this would benefit both communities. The general community gets new improved stuff that someone else paid for, the original creator gets to foist the continued maintenance and baseline inclusion off on the wider community. In conclusion, I feel that Squeak has enough in it to serve as the encompassing paradigm, i.e. we're not going to be confronting "The OmegaStore Backup Utility - Scripting powered by Squeak", but I do believe you could see "The OmegaStore Backup Plugin" for your Squeak desktop. It is possible to create an avenue where work from individual elements of the community can flow back to the community at large, and I think there's enough here to make the system self sustaining, especially given our labor costs :-) Left for later - what about the organizations using Squeak as part of a total hardware solution, i.e. the aforementioned omegastore as a $1M SAN device using Squeak as the control language ? OK, well if it were tape based then a squeak iterator would probably be fast enough :-) Regards All Mark/Vibrant 3D

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Re: AW: [Squeakfoundation]What I would like to promote
by goran.hultgren＠bluefish.se 28 Jan '02

28 Jan '02

cg(a)home.cdegroot.com (Cees de Groot) wrote: > Andreas Raab <Andreas.Raab(a)gmx.de> said: > >Personally, I'm in for some of the larger chunks first. > > > Add my vote to that. Another vote too. By the way - I have voting capability on SqueakDot now, so I added this one, and I have already voted for me, Cees and Andreas - vote here: http://marvin.bluefish.se:8080/squeakdot This is what I referred to as the "Cell Splitting Approach". :-) regards, Göran

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Re: [Squeakfoundation]Brainstormin'
by Maarten Maartensz 23 Jan '02

23 Jan '02

Dear Mark, At 10:52 21-1-02 -0500, you wrote: >Dr. Maartensz, I agree deeply with your argument for integrating >Squeak into Universities. That's why I'm doing the things I'm doing, >such as the books and the workshop. I am a "drs." - which translates as M.A./M.Sc. in US terms - at present, though I am supposed to get a Ph.D. this year (the work being mostly done). But this is merely to straighten out the titular prefix stuff, about which Cees de Groot rightly remarked that most are in it for the money, not the knowledge. >It's not just Georgia Tech using Squeak in real classes. Visit >http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mmworkshop -- Bucknell and U. >California-Santa Barbara are using it, as are Portland State, UC-San >Diego, and Pepperdine. You're right that it would be great to get >into some top tier schools, but that takes time. You're a student of >history, sir -- you know that "revolutions" are not the >all-of-a-sudden thing that they're often portrayed as. Instead, >there's typically a long, slow, quiet burn before a sudden awareness >by the populace. I like that Squeak has a growing, intense community. >When Squeak "suddenly" appears at top-name universities, it will >appear as a revolution to many. You are quite right, and I am glad to hear about some universities using and teaching it I didn't yet know about. My general point was and is in line with Tim Rowledge's "Get off your butts!", in the sense that I see a group of dedicated people working hard on a very good thing - that needs not only good developers (which there are), but also an "officially recognized status" in society, in the universities, and in the media. >I disagree, though, with your argument for documentation. Yes, of >course, more and better documentation would be great, but that's not >what's holding Squeak back. Squeak 2.7 and 2.8 were and are terrific >releases -- many people are using them happily (e.g., some of my grad >students are quite happy with those and won't upgrade yet). The old >documentation and the "old" books still work quite well for those. Well - the problem here is basically the audience you seek or have. In your case, with your students, you are probably right. But what I am thinking of is getting students who are not specializing in computing getting Squeak by way of a university course. Here in Amsterdam, the social sciences faculties, for example, offer courses in Java, which to me is mostly a waste of time, and to those who took such courses - that I spoke with - usually a turn off from programming. These are students who are supposed to get to grips with a new language while having little or no experience with programming, and who spend some 3 months of course points on it. The general result seems to be - except for a few - that they give up on programming, having gotten thoroughly lost in the technicalities of Java. I can't blame them, and in fact think they are right - about Java, not about programming. >I found your reference to trying to tide over "genuine academics >through the current Post-Modern Dark Age" intriguing, but if you >believe that, is only Squeak 3.2 good enough to tide over genuine >academics? People on the main list sometimes joke that there's >nothing new since Smalltalk-72, but there's a certain truth to that. >The old isn't bad just because the new is better. The "Post-Modern Dark Age" referred to a point Cees de Groot made about modern students not being interested in academic knowledge anymore. What I have in mind as regards the U.S. is fairly well if somewhat bombastically explained by: Alan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind - How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students." This was published more than 10 years ago, and meanwhile the situation has NOT improved. (But I am aware these are large issues not easily discussed rationally by e-mail, and certainly not with people who were mis-educated through no fault of their own. One simple example of this is that my generation of Dutch academics could read English, German and French with little problem, and had some Latin and Greek when having passed grammar school. The later generations only know broken English. By my lights they have been cheated out of the chance to get to grips with large chunks of written civilization my generation at least got the chance to read if thus inclined.) >The latest-and-greatest truly is great, but it's a constantly moving >target. Technology will only help with getting documentation >available to a small extent -- good documentation is HARD to do. >Documentation will ALWAYS be behind, sir, but I don't believe that >it's a dire situation. There are LOTS of features in 2.8 through 3.2 >that I don't know how to use. That's okay -- Squeak is still a >wonderful tool to think and learn with. What I know about Squeak >transfers forward and helps me to learn new things. I spend a lot of >time in my first week of classes on how to find things (via the >Method Finder and Explorers, etc.) What Squeak lacks for in >documentation, it makes up for in tools for self-discovery. Again, I basically agree - with my qualification I made above: Being so much impressed by Squeak's potential, I want to see it learned by university-students of most or all subjects, and this simply makes it necessary to have course materials that allow this to be done in the space of a few months - and WITHOUT disgusting most of them by the sort of technicalese that is Java. >Squeak's growing -- maybe not as fast as one might like, but >revolutions do take time. "Lack of documentation" should not be used >as an excuse -- go ahead and write the next set of documentation that >you see that will be useful, get Squeak in your own universities, and >gather people face-to-face as you describe. I'm not a hacker with 16 >hours a day to explore Squeak, sir -- I'm an over-worked associate >professor teaching 150+ students a semester with three kids under 10. >It is possible to do great things with Squeak -- now, as it is today. I certainly didn't intend to criticize you - indeed, you have been doing what I recommend should be done, thereby also showing what I recommend is possible. "Chapeau!" as they say in French. ("Hats off!") What I did have in mind were some people on the list (I won't name) who sometimes seem to forget that in actual fact most people who are impressed by Squeak and who are not computer scientists or students thereof must somehow be able to learn its basic concepts and ways of working in a few months, inbetween other stuff they have to do, and without having a solid grounding in computing. Apart from that, I may have an inclination to sometimes phrase things (too) sharply to make my point. My sincere apologies if I offended you - in fact, you are an example to many, and have done excellent work which I thank you for. And part of the intent of my mail was to move OTHER people with academic positions to try to do as you did. This IS difficult - what with administrations, university bureaucracies, financing of courses, Squeak being hardly known etc. - but it surely is worth trying. I hope the upcoming "flagship demo" of Squeak News may make a positive difference in this regard, simply by showing others what is possible with Squeak, and putting it under the noses of university administrators etc. to show them there is more and better than Java to teach to students who are taking - mostly enforced - courses in programming for their degrees. Best regards, Maarten. >Mark > >-- >-------------------------- >Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 >Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies. >Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/ >(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu >http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html P.S. I got the original returned as unsendable. Probably there is some odd quirk somewhere, so I repost this. Sorry if this reaches you twice. ------------------------------------------ Maarten Maartensz. Homepage: http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/ ------------------------------------------

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Bylaws and stuff
by cg＠home.cdegroot.com 23 Jan '02

23 Jan '02

I've put up some links to open source related foundations and similarly interesting websites on http://swiki.squeakfoundation.org/squeakfoundation/12 - I would appreciate additions. The idea is to collect lots of bylaws and charters so we can all study 'the competition' when working on the legal stuff involved with incorporating. -- Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <cg(a)cdegroot.com> GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD 1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B

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Organization Foundation
by Mark Mullin 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

Figured I'd throw in my fractional monetary units 1) I don't agree with the proposal to make a restricted official communications mechanism for organizational issues. When this is done 'officially' it too often divides the worlds into the 'haves' and 'have nots', bifurcated on access to this channel in some meaningful fashion. In short, restricted organizational membership is often followed by paid corporate access in some fashion that is fundamentally exclusionary to the rest of the membership, e.g. the old vrml and ogl working groups. I argue that Squeaks strengths are best applied in as democratic environment as possible, interactive squeak + fileins of 'knowledge' is a lot more flexible and forgiving then say, trying to get those first versions of STL running on C++ on AIX on version....... Needs of the organizers to communicate privately are already well handled by email, hell you can even go get the slash code and set up a whole community site. I have no problem with that existing, but I do have a problem with it being official and restricted. The utter inability of the 'unknown stranger' to be able to communicate __in any fashion__ without paying off the bouncer at the door isn't healthy in the long run. 2) I do agree with the repeated calls to get on with the mechanical details of creating such an organization. I further move we table all comments about what projects individual working groups might focus on until we know what the hell the organization looks like :-) OK, not that harsh, I'd sooner code than manage most days myself, but at some point the rubber has to hit the road. 3) We should drive issues of "marketing" Squeak and the foundation in a combined effort. The bottom line goal is to get more people in more domains using Squeak in projects they are investing real resources in, and to return part of that investment of resources to the community at large. 1st class OO systems, esp ST and Sq, are some of the finest mechanisms we've ever come up with for sharing codified knowledge in the form of programs, i.e. you're not going to see a C++ programmer file out a fix and a goodie for a buddy in the middle of a debugging session anytime soon. If we could have it so that, on average, 10% of the intellectual/engineering effort of public and private squeak based projects came back into the community fold, that plus all those debugging fixes and goodies gives you the basis for steady growth, and solid long term prospects for the system, the foundation, and it's community. 3a) I'd recommend one approach be to exploit the current problems with Java. Ignoring all the other issues, Microsoft talked a good chunk of corporate america into using their whizzy java extensions to make information tools, and now microsoft has basically abandoned them. Public access and rights to your underlying technology guarantees that this can't happen to you. When that is coupled with a stable user community, it's pretty much unassailable, as evidenced by the current price point of a high quality unix os. Squeak allows any organization that can apply it to control their own means of production and distribution in a better way than say, Windows + Msft Java VM + classlib 3.2 + absolute edict forbidding anyone ever to use XP. I'd also hit on the fact that for the average person, if it's related to a computer and on your desktop, real or virtual - it came from Smalltalk. I've found that this resonates pretty strongly with those that didn't know it. For those that go, yeah that was my gram's system, explain blocks. Secret stealth agenda - don't tell redmond..... I hear that some people already have windows autostarting into squeak, and it's not like there isn't a lot of free os stuff out there. I believe one group that should go for broke as a sig is one to provide display and data management classes for microsoft office files and other unfortunately standardized products. OS components + Squeak + (mesa, some 3d lib) + (msft data classes) ==> no more windows. Lessee... Hello corporate america.... how'd you like a high quality interactive fully dependable open sourced open licensed system to take care of all your os/system level needs. Oh yeah, we think spreadsheets, documents, and databases are basic os level needs. Keep your support budget, it's not that free. But you can keep the checks you used to send to redmond. Anyway, my rant for a monday evening. take it for what its worth. but i do think that it would be nice to put a foundation together, and i think squeak has a lot of very positive things to say about itself. Mark/Vibrant 3D

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RE: [Squeakfoundation]Brainstormin'
by Ivan Tomek 21 Jan '02

21 Jan '02

I come close - I am using VisualWorks in several of my courses and encourage my students to look at Squeak. Ivan Tomek Jodrey School of Computer Science Acadia University Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada > -----Original Message----- > From: cg(a)home.cdegroot.com [mailto:cg@home.cdegroot.com] > Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 4:14 PM > To: squeakfoundation(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > Subject: Re: [Squeakfoundation]Brainstormin' > > > Mark Guzdial <guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu> said: > >It's not just Georgia Tech using Squeak in real classes. Visit > >http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mmworkshop -- Bucknell and U. > >California-Santa Barbara are using it, as are Portland State, UC-San > >Diego, and Pepperdine. > > You're forgetting that little corner of the world that lies > outside the > USofA - you remember these folk from Argentina with their MatMorphs? I > also vaguely recall seeing a lot of University of Bern, > Switzerland guys > hanging out on the Squeak lists... ;-) > > -- > Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com > <cg(a)cdegroot.com> > GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD 1986 F303 937F > E098 9E8B > _______________________________________________ > Squeakfoundation mailing list > Squeakfoundation(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/listinfo/squeakfoundation >

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Re: [Squeakfoundation]sqf-formation list
by Tyrrell, Les 21 Jan '02

21 Jan '02

How very amusing. Now I see that you have it set up so that my mail client must verify who I am before replying! Cooperate, Cees. Give in- you know that Redmond has your best interests at heart. Go with the flow! Actually, are you having an identity crises? I mean, who else but you is going to be sending e-mail from your account? Do you really need these paranoic levels of protocol to protect yourself from your alter-ego? ( amused ;^) - les ( or is it... ) Cees de Groot <cg(a)home.cdegroot.com> wrote in message news:<a2ggjp$e52$1(a)home.cdegroot.com>... > Les Tyrrell <tyrrell(a)canis.uiuc.edu> said: > >2 ) Many of your e-mails ( Cees, that is ) are showing up in my client as > >attached text files... > > These are probably the mails I send from my mail client, instead of my > newsreader (I throw most of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to in my news > spool). It automatically signs the mails using a standardized protocol > (defined in RFC1847 in 1995). It seems that your mail client doesn't support > this protocol - I think it should, maybe you can have a chat with whoever > makes your mail client. > > Anyway, I've now added the SqF list to my news spool as well, so you shouldn't > be seeing a lot of these messages on the lists coming from me. > > -- > Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <cg(a)cdegroot.com> > GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD 1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B > _______________________________________________ > Squeakfoundation mailing list > Squeakfoundation(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/listinfo/squeakfoundation >

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Re: [Squeakfoundation]sqf-formation list
by Mark A. Schwenk 21 Jan '02

21 Jan '02

At 08:40 PM 1/20/2002 +0100, Cees de Groot wrote: ... >In order to combine openness with efficiency, I've setup a mailing list for >those that are directly involved with the gory details of setting up the >Squeak Foundation. .... >Is that OK with everybody? I wish you would leave this stuff on the squeakfoundation list. I don't see a need for another list at this point. If you are creating another list, please add me to it. -Mark Schwenk WellThot Inc.

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Re: [Squeakfoundation]Re: SqueakFoundation; get off your butts you lot!
by goran.hultgren＠bluefish.se 21 Jan '02

21 Jan '02

ducasse <ducasse(a)iam.unibe.ch> wrote: > Hi > > I would like to organize the projects on which people are ready to work. > We could then build some groups and people could code and tests with. > I was thinking for example that a CVS client integrated into Squeak would be > great to support the process (Goran ;)) I will bump up the sqcvs release with some fixes in the very near future in order to make it useful for VMMaker (Tim gave me a small prioritized list). Do note that sqcvs is the basis for a CVS client, but it has nil UI. :-) Someone interested? regards, Göran

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Re: [Squeakfoundation]sqf-formation list
by Simon Michael 21 Jan '02

21 Jan '02

cg(a)cdegroot.com (Cees de Groot) writes: > Is that OK with everybody? NO! Cees I'm usually a fan but I think hard work has softened your brain here. :-) We don't need another squeakfoundation list at this point. Thanks for your labours on our behalf, regards, -Simon

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Squeakfoundation January 2002