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