Several people on this list imply there is money just begging to be raised and spent on open source Squeak related things. They may well be right, and such statements may be even more true as time passes. Here are some ideas to consider using when persuading foundation program officers to lobby their funding boards to donate funds to a Squeak Community Foundation. It's a little political, but so are some of the points that need to be made to make the argument that funding free software will produce good things for society.
In general, there are many reasons "open source" or "free software" projects might be funded as charitable causes. Here are some interesting comments on this (written as a semi-open letter to Michael Phillips): http://remarque.org/~turner/to-mp.html General statements of the public value of open or free results can be found through on the pages of these two major organizations: http://www.opensource.org/ http://www.fsf.org/ If anyone has any other pointers to links, I'd love to see them.
If you read any of Richard Stallman's philosophy at all [many people criticize him without reading his works] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ http://www.stallman.org/ http://www.carnall.demon.co.uk/stallman/index.html you will see he argues that the most important aspect of "free software" is that you are free to adapt it to your needs -- not that you get it for free or that it was made by volunteers (neither of which may be true) or even that is under the viral GPL (which is not required for software to be called "free" by his definition).
The problem with the current funding approach for most software development from Stallman's point of view is that as a side effect of creating an artificial scarcity for their product (to encourage users to pay for it), software vendors restrict users' ability to make and redistribute derivative works. This limits the individual's opportunities to improve the software to meet their own needs. It also limits the community's ability to evolve software through cooperation. It doesn't matter how efficient the current system may or may not be -- the deeper point is the desire for this "freedom" to adapt things to local needs and to improve them and share improvements in a community.
That limitation on collaboration imposed by proprietary software wasn't as significant before the internet became as widespread and heavily used as now. Before the internet, is was very difficult to do any sort of fine-grained collaboration with anyone unless you were either in the same building with them or were working at a large organization with a private network infrastructure. Thus, groups collaborating as closely as those in the Squeak community simply could not form or sustain themselves on a practical basis (outside of large organizations or universities, which is where much free software originated pre-web).
That limitation on derived works has a negative effect on service businesses, because they may be unable to tailor software products to meet the needs of their clients. Imagine for example if your lawyer told you they could not modify their boilerplate contract for your needs, or your doctor said they could not alter the dose of a drug to your exact physiology.
The issue also isn't just what a service person can do at the moment. Service companies often make specific alliances with vendors of proprietary solutions to sell their tools in a particular year. The deeper issue is also what exactly the service provider has spent years using and learning. Without widespread open solutions available for easy study, it is less likely there will be knowledgeable and experienced service people who know of a wide range of open solution that may be tailored to your needs. It is also less likely they will be familiar with them from personal experience. You probably won't find another similar vendor around the block selling the same proprietary solution modified in the same ways to give you a choice of service providers. The point is -- proprietary solutions can have a negative effect on people getting their needs met even when they are willing to pay money.
There are also larger overall societal costs to proprietary solutions. Essentially we are otherwise heading towards Digital Rights Management software on every computer. Charging for every use of every file is like making every road a toll road. Lots of things can go wrong with such systems. I discuss some of them in this post to gnu.misc.discuss where I mention four things that went wrong during a recent drive I took down a toll road: http://groups.google.com/groups?ic=1&selm=3B0B2DD1.40BDD739%40kurtz-fern...
Stallman would argue these are more subtle effects of proprietary software that makes criminal the neighborly impulse to share software. This is potentially corrupting morally. It can promote a disrespect for the law. It is also slowly leading to draconian social controls starting with the DMCA (unauthorized copying can now be a felony instead of just incurring a civil penalty). It is also justifying increased surveillance and decreased privacy. The Prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s has a similar effect on our society, and eventually those laws were repealed and alcohol became a legal, but somewhat regulated and highly taxed drug. Unfortunately, the widening use of wiretaps and other new police methods that weakened privacy in the United States during Alcohol Prohibition remained after prohibition ended. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/drugs/000912/4128274.html
Both the medical and legal professions are highly paid, and both entail professionals understanding a large body of generally public domain knowledge and applying it to client's specific situations. Both doctors and lawyers create new knowledge that is effectively put into the public domain in the form of medical journal articles or court proceedings. To help a lawyer to understand free or open source software, just ask her or him to think about it in terms of the law itself -- from court proceedings to legislative records. While lawyers may pay for a service like Westlaw service for convenience or practical necessity, http://www.westlaw.com/about/ they are not paying to use the law itself, say when they make an argument in court.
Surely nobody would suggest the world was better off in the days of 18th-century England when a medical student had to crawl on top of a roof and look in from a skylight to find out the proprietary technique used by one group of secretive obstetricians to have a lower rate of infant and maternal mortality than their competitors: http://www.ogilvy.com/memorial/html/onads.htm Yet, people do die when software fails -- on airplanes, space stations, cars, telephone networks, and medical equipment. Is it unreasonable to hope someday the software "profession" might operate on a professional basis more like doctors and lawyers do now?
While the the companies selling proprietary software may lose funds if more software was developed on the basis of grants, the individuals and companies who know how to work within the common software infrastructure will be in demand. Right now, if you can believe the Linux trade press, Linux skills are in widespread demand at high pay rates across the country. Proprietary Unix skills (outside of a few specialized places) were never in quite as widespread demand like this across all types of products (embedded, desktop, server, mainframe). The same thing is true for, say, proprietary VisualWorks skills. They are only in demand in a few specialized places -- not everywhere in every industry. An open Squeak, widely adopted, might create a widespread demand for Smalltalk development experience and related consulting opportunities. While it is a compromise, if you can spend half your time consulting and half your time writing your own free software (and be twice as productive because of access to other's work to build on), and earn from your half-time consulting as much or more (because you and your client are more productive) than when you tried just to sell proprietary software, everyone might be better off. As someone who has tried to sell software, I can definitely say consulting pays a lot better, and most of the other people I have talked to who sold software have echoed this as well. (Obviously a few people have succeeded wildly at selling proprietary software, but most have not. Still, like with gambling, the allure remains.)
For software development processes funded directly by grants, where the result was open and free, then even if you were not the one to get the grant, you could at least benefit from the results and improve them to meet your needs. So even if the granting process was unfair (and most probably are for whatever reasons, typically because peer review rarely funds the innovative proposal from the unknown inventor), non-grantees at least would still benefit somewhat from the end product of the grant, because they could build on that end product. (Currently much software written from grant funds, say, at universities, is still allowed to be considered proprietary by the developer, but that's another sad story.)
If grants for free software make sense, then grant requests to fund services assisting developer communities, like a Squeak "Community" Foundation, should be even more attractive to potential donors.
I feel things have come a long way from, say, 1997, when in response to a grant pre-proposal to the NSF discussing creating a community of developers around an open source version of our garden simulator, the response was: "We don't understand why you don't want to sell the program commercially". [We discussed exactly that issue in the proposal.] http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
(By the way, that simulator project is still one I would like to move to Squeak, and the Delphi source is available on our site if anyone is interested.)
-Paul Fernhout Kurtz-Fernhout Software ========================================================= Developers of custom software and educational simulations Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com