Hello,
Summarizing the drift of some recent mails I'd propose the following to both Squeak.org and the Squakfoundation:
- To maintain TWO releases as a standard policy: A. Developers' release B. Learning & Teaching release
where (A) is what we have at present, is intended for knowledgeable Squeakers, and is short of documentation, and (B) comes with a LOT of documentation written inside Squeak as Active Essays and is explicitly targetted at Newbies, University courses, and learning to program. (After all, Squeak provides better facilities for its own documentation than any other language + environment I know.)
Part of (B) would be a generally cleaned-up (refactored, debugged) image, that also includes Class Comments (written in clear English, please WITHOUT prose like "I am (a piece of code that) ... " and WITH plenty examples that can be run from the Comments. (Indeed, if this proposal (B) gets going it might take the form of several images, like several volumes of a book.)
A good start for (B) would be to have a look at the issues of Squeak News, and one important consideration is that the contents of (B) should be not only be relatively bug-free, stable and well-commented, but also should be written in clear English and be explicitly addressed at people with little or no programming experience, while giving them a "hands on" introduction to computing with Squeak in the form of Active Essays, that show and illustrate the code they explain.
To achieve (B) will need some coordinated effort, and seems to me to be a worthy target for the SqueakFoundation as a first important project. Also, to be succesfull it needs to be at least somewhat decently written and to presuppose little or no inital knowledge of Smalltalk or programming. Good starts where to look for relevant material, ideas and approaches are the issues Squeak News and projects on Bob Arnings' Superswiki.
Finally (somewhat) in the present context: I agree with Lex Spoon's recent remark to the effect that "open source" is a more comprehensive term than the OpenSource.org admits, and that Squeak IS patently open source in coming with its source code. I think it unwise to restrict the meaning of "open source" to what gets the blessing of the OpenSource.org: The basic principle of open source applications, after all, is that one gets to see and manipulate all the code of the application and not whether OpenSource.org or Richard Stallmann are willing to endorse it as open source in THEIR preferred senses.
Regards,
Maarten.
------------------------------------------ Maarten Maartensz. Homepage: http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/ ------------------------------------------