Just to make it clear what my intentions are when I suggested SqF could be based on Apache. I would like to see Squeak be available to subsequent generations of educators and researchers as well as share the burden of SqC with respect to evolution and support of Squeak. While I have a long commercial Smalltalk history, my agenda now is to use it (which was what I started off doing before and ended up in a different place <grin>).
Some thoughts...
- Apache is non-profit company with a well known and respected set of social and business protocols. I've already offered to support the legal work if there is a energetic community with projects. Apache is focused on a product which I don't think suites the SqF which should have a mission of evolution and creativity while admitting efforts to produce base images, components etc. SqF should seek to be inclusive in the spirit of Squeak, not fragment due to different needs.
- I think we need a leader at the top of the meritocracy and the only person that the world could easily agree on is Dan Ingalls. "Linus" Mouse<g>.
- We need a community that is prepared to work WITHOUT money which is how most communities are built. When the discussion begins with money it usually goes down hill with community. Communities are usually built during difficult times when people share a common goal.
- A Squeak community needs to encourage diversity so I think it is important that StableSqueak, UnStableSqueak, MVCForeverSqueak, MorphicSqueak, PipSqueak be thought of as separate projects which are enabled by Squeak rather than assume there should be "the Squeak" code base. This allows smaller communities of interest to exist in SqF. I think one of the problems is that people are trying to define a Squeak image which leads to boring and aging artifacts like ANSI Smalltalk.
Best Wishes
Dave Thomas Old Country Programmer and Object Troll
Dave wrote:
Some thoughts...
Hear hear.
Except that I think _some_ money is needed to pay the rent on the meeting places that provide the venues for the community to meet. In this case, I think the important meeting room is a high reliabilty server looked after by a trustable ISP so that we don't suffer outages and data losses.
tim@sumeru.stanford.edu said:
Except that I think _some_ money is needed to pay the rent on the meeting places that provide the venues for the community to meet. In this case, I think the important meeting room is a high reliabilty server looked after by a trustable ISP so that we don't suffer outages and data losses.
Don't worry, Tim, I run such a company and the SqF won't need to pay us for that (at least not until it starts eating /major/ parts of our bandwidth, at which time I think it won't be very hard to find some sponsors). I've got a development/emergency backup server already running Swiki's (swiki.cdegroot.com/squeakfoundation) and if there's a serious effort around a Squeak Foundation, there's no problem in moving that to our production machines (IBM servers with lots of RAID arrays, 24x7 pagers and other impressive thingies ;-)).
Cees de Groot wrote:
Don't worry, Tim, I run such a company and the SqF won't need to pay us for that (at least not until it starts eating /major/ parts of our bandwidth, at which time I think it won't be very hard to find some sponsors). I've got a development/emergency backup server already running Swiki's (swiki.cdegroot.com/squeakfoundation) and if there's a serious effort around a Squeak Foundation, there's no problem in moving that to our production machines (IBM servers with lots of RAID arrays, 24x7 pagers and other impressive thingies ;-)).
Excellent news. Thank you for such a generous offer.
Guess that all we need now is to raise the million dollars a year so the foundation can license the logo from me :-)
tim
Apache is focused on a product which I don't think suites the SqF [...]
Well, it seems that nowadays Apache is working on a whole range of products, of which the webserver is just one. It is telling that www.apache.org is now about the Apache Foundation, and that you need to go to httpd.apache.org to learn about their "HTTPD product"...
- I think we need a leader at the top of the meritocracy and the only [...]
- We need a community that is prepared to work WITHOUT money which is [...]
Twice agreed. At the very least, I can offer hosting to the SqF so there goes an important money drain.
- A Squeak community needs to encourage diversity so I think it is [...]
That has a serious "need for a Chaordic organizational process" smell to it. I like the process a lot and have some experience with it (Sun's Jini Community is applying it, and I had the honour to work in its Technical Oversight Committee during the last year). It's a tough process and really needs some motivated people to get it going, but the end result will be much better and far more suited to the kind of diversity you are describing. In fact this was one of the bigger reasons to use this process for the Jini Community, to create a structure that could support heterogeneous members with varying agendas.
squeakfoundation@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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cg＠cdegroot.com -
Dave -
Tim Rowledge