Declare that SqF exists,

It does - it has its own website!

My opinion: go ahead! Preempt(?) the forkers!

Andreas

At 5/23/2001 02:31 PM, Dan Ingalls wrote:

Instead, why not

    Declare that SqF exists,

    Appoint a number of "acting" officers

    Declare a couple of active projects
            one of which is to converge on a more formal
            def of the organization

    I think I could even raise a few $$ to carry us through the 

interim period

What do others feel?

    - Dan

Go for it, Dan! I've been sitting on the sidelines waiting for an opportunity to contribute--and I'm still waiting.

Let's get the mouse moving!

-Mark Schwenk WellThot Inc.

Dan Ingalls wrote:

I think I could even raise a few $$ to carry us through the interim period

== money for what? ===

I would add that "money for what?" is a big issue. As long as no money is involved, then whatever anybody wants to do is fine with me. If my money is involved (which it isn't right now) then I'll be more conservative in the organizational structure I give it to, especially in terms of it accountability to the purpose towards which I contributed.

My own priorities go first towards anything like modularity that helps the management of complexity, and second a clear license (and statement of originality) for each and every contribution (including those from SqueakC) starting from the first Apple release. However, I know that many people question the need for the first, and the second isn't even on most other people's radar screens.

As a minor note, I'd love to see a reliable version of Squeak for the top major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) with a VM set up in such a way that people could ship an end user app (i.e. no extra options for VM preferences in the startup windows to confuse people, etc.). That's a real show stopper for me as far as shipping anything with Squeak. It is of course minor coding to add an option or a change to the default, but it is a showstopper nonetheless because it requires recompiles on every platform, which requires having the right version of the source for the VM and the right image to go with that VM etc. And then there is truncating and syncing files on the Mac (a minor thing but a showstopper for a really good cross-platform database in Squeak, such as for a code repository).

== fairness and volunteerism ===

If money isn't handled well by the foundation it may create a fairness issue and ingroup/outgroup mentality that could be detrimental to Squeak. I think that is the biggest risk to just grabbing some funds and splashing them around. I've seen other projects wrestle with this. So, money for what? Programmers? Websites? Hardware? Travel? Balloons?

If what it comes down to is raising funds to put a programmer on Squeak full time on certain basic issues, then just lay it on the line. It doesn't even require a Foundation to do that. But, be careful. I don't think anyone volunteering time would begrudge the originators of Smalltalk and a couple others at Disney being funded by Disney to do Squeak development. There are probably another one to two dozen or so full-time Squeakers at various companies employed for various reasons related to corporate objectives. The Squeak Foundation isn't as near as I can tell intended to be a for-profit venture with a product to sell created by paid programming staff, or a commercial service supported by internal paid programming staff, which are the two financial models supporting programmers most of us are familiar with. However, as soon as we talk about fundraising through a public foundation to support programmers to do work that may otherwise done on a volunteer basis, then different standards of fairness and motivation apply.

If part of the mission of the foundation is to encourage voluntary efforts by Squeak programmers, then whether money is spent at all on "programming" of various sorts (as opposed to just other things) is, I feel, a big issue. The fastest way to kill Squeak off might be to get all those people now volunteering their time to be busy thinking about when they will get paid for that work, putting things off, feeling they are not paid enough if they are paid by the foundation, and so forth. I would direct people's attention to this web page: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html "Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"

That's one of the reasons I did not pursue the Business Squeak idea I proposed a couple years ago even after I got some level of interest in pledging money towards four months of my work. (Another was not wanting to directly compete with the good guys doing good things like Dolphin Smalltalk.) And realistically, lots of person years of programming have already gone into Squeak, so if a small amount of work is going to make a difference it has to be very targeted towards a specific niche that is within striking distance. I think Stable Squeak was a nice example, but again, will that volunteer effort die if we pay someone through SqF? In the case I outlined back then the concept was basically to support using Squeak to make more or less shareware-quality business applications under Windows (and hopefully later other platforms) with an alternate widget set (which was my own immediate need for Squeak at the time). However, whether that is where money should go now would have to be revisited.

== a few proposals for paying people ===

Not that he might want to do this, but if money is sloshing around begging to be spent, consider paying Tim Rowledge (who's apparently available and who I feel would be an excellent choice) to spend his time coordinating changes made by volunteers (or SqueakC) and doing related refactoring and testing. Since that grunge work is way beneath Tim's ability, and he could do the same amount of such work in half the time (or less) most other people could, obviously it would make sense to pay part of his time for doing whatever he wanted related to supporting the SqF Purpose to make up for the hair pulling side of the other part (and the fact that he'll probably get less than he is worth to, say, Cincom). If he could take some of the integration burden from SqueakC, then SqueakC might pitch in part of the funding at first. However, there needs to be absolute clarity on the license status of works produced, and in the case of hiring any experienced Smalltalk VM developer like Tim who has worked for a Smalltalk company, there would need to be an absolute confidence that all work will be non-infringing (and will avoid even the appearance of such as a possibility), or that questionable areas will be handled by someone else or in a "clean room" process.

As another alternative if one is looking for ways to spend money on Squeak, one might create a process where people earmark funds for a specific task and then eventually someone (like Tim or whoever) does it on a project by project basis. An existing site that does this is Cosource http://www.cosource.com/ and we could even consider using it or something similar for that purpose. Such approaches avoid having to funnel money through the foundation itself (which does not exist yet as a legal entity with a checking account). But again, the social dynamics and impact of paying for development on volunteering need to be considered. (And frankly, without modularity and complexity management, these projects could still get swept aside and that would be especially frustrating for those developers expecting to get paid.)

I'm a big fan of Michael Phillips' (Organizer of MasterCard) writings http://www.well.com/~mp/ like "The Seven Laws of Money" and "Honest Business". (I just realized this is funny, because Dee Hock who I also like of the Chaordic Alliance founded Visa. Perhaps innovation is being bred in the banks!) One of the things Michael Phillips argues for when money starts changing hands in a business is open books. Open books saved the Coevolution Quarterly when they were about to go under and a mysterious donor showed up. That means knowing people's salaries, benefits, etc. when paid by the foundation. And that is a contentious thing (but if it is the path chosen, it's much easier if it gets going from the start.) If that concept is rejected, then please think deeply about how foundation financial accountability will be maintained.

-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

Dan Ingalls wrote:

I have some concern for the pace of bringing SqF into existence.

=== why I've been quiet on this list ====

I am torn on the bigger picture of what efforts SqF should be supporting, and that is one reason I have kept quiet the past couple of weeks.

I just saw Alan Kay speak where I am currently contracting and he mentioned in his talk that some people are more "religious" about Squeak than SqueakC (which he says tries not to be "religious" about Squeak). He sees Squeak as a platform to build the next great thing, and then maybe use that as the foundation for the n+1 great thing. Certainly when I look at Squeak, as great as it is, I see it could be something more -- more easily supporting prototypes, supporting other languages on a common base, acting as a distributed digital library, supporting Doug Englebart's 1968 Augment vision, and so on.

I am concerned that without some discussion of this vision issue (and maybe we have done enough to get started, since we have at least a purpose?) we will basically end up with a SqF which essentially is a loosely run company with poorly paid workers supporting a slower alternative to VisualWorks. That might not be a bad thing, and I think such an goal may be what is indirectly driving some of the interest in making donations.

I've certainly considered paying Cincom perhaps $2000 annually. I would prefer to have a cross-platform Smalltalk base not requiring me to report each sale, and I have an immediate application in mind to port to it, so I might consider that amount as a business expense towards SqF. If I had confidence in the people and process I should then be willing to pay $2000 towards such a thing as part of, say, 50 others doing the same. However, a VisualWorks-lite isn't really the main Squeak vision and then we're also talking commercial coding, trust, deliverables, etc. which imply other things about how priorities are set and by whom. Also, if Squeak rapidly evolves, to the next level, then that effort might be be abandoned. Also, for me, if I feel the legal status of contributions to Squeak is not clear in terms of licenses and statements of originality, then the money may just be wasted as a business investment if I decide not to use the end product. So, I am wary of such an approach, as much as I would like a royalty-free VisualWorks-lite.

As Alan Kay said in that talk, Squeak shows that five talented and knowledgeable people in their 50s and 60s could for about $5 million dollars total over a few years take 1975 technology to its ultimate limit and produce things way beyond other projects (like Java) with hundreds or thousands of developers costing hundreds of millions of dollars. [For reference, Linux is more like technology from 1970 taken to its ultimate. Alan of course would never discount the community in Squeak's success, but obviously that community wouldn't have gotten rolling without the core effort.] Yet, in how he talks about this, clearly Alan has a vision to go further, and doesn't want Squeak to "eat her young" like he says Lisp did. He clearly sees the need for new approaches transcending what Squeak is now.

Related to this, the issue I've mentioned before on the list of a lack of clear licensing status for each contribution is to an extent one symptom of what I see as a need for modularity and complexity management. There are other symptoms that have been discussed at length on the main list. And, not to be too critical, but I think the management of complexity is by far the hardest part of programming at this point, and as sparkling and useful as Squeak is now (and thanks for it) it will be a rough to transition Squeak from a paradigm (and related code) where the management of complexity has not been the primary issue for several years to a new paradigm (and new code) related to more explicitly managing that complexity. People like Les Tyrrell have been working on such tools (Oasis) for years. It is a hard problem.

Squeak currently supports a culture of people comfortable with a certain tool set and a certain level of complexity managed using those tools (essentially the browser, project, and changeset). While Squeak itself may have only 200K lines of code in the mainline distribution, the community as a whole surely has tens or hundreds of times that much code (and many times that in various intermediate versions) -- and taken as a whole, that makes for a lot of complexity.

In other words, and obviously it's not quite this bad, but, if the complex house of cards is near to going crashing down in flames without some major changes, why should it be the Squeak Foundation that takes the heat? Perhaps instead a "burn the disk packs" approach might make more sense (such as Jecel Assumpcao Jr is doing with a new VM approach). That way a new system with a clear title for every contribution, organized in a modular way, with additional complexity management tools, could be built from the ground up in a distributed fashion by the Squeak community. Obviously, though "burn the disk packs" doesn't build that much on the existing Squeak community or knowledgebase, and so who would the developers or users be? Still, let's assume complexity management is, say, 1980 technology. How do we get it, and how should this fit into the SqF agenda?

What this will probably get translated to in practice is a question of what version of Squeak is supported and how that integrates with supporting all the other Squeak efforts that are based on the latest version of Squeak (3.1). But will that be satisfying?

-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

Last May I wrote...

Declare that SqF exists,

Appoint a number of "acting" officers

Declare a couple of active projects one of which is to converge on a more formal def of the organization

As token "Old Fart" I'm willing to be put in any role. I'll even appoint myself and everybody else if no one wants to do this. And I'll make up a project list (you can guess from prior messages).

Dave Thomas has generously offered to help us through the formation of an organization, and a mechanism for receiving and distributing funds. This will be a tremendous help.

To get things going, and to enable Dave to do his part, we need at least to convene an interim organization. In order to speed things along, I propose the following structure for the organization:

Board of Directors:

Executive Director:

Treasurer:

Legal Counsel:

Committee Chairmen:

Evolution of Squeak

Public Relations and Web Presence

Updates and Releases

Projects

True to my message of May, I hereby appoint myself as interim Executive Director and chairman of the Committee on Evolution of Squeak, acting until, say, June 1.

In the next couple of days all those who are interested should send to this list, or privately to me,

criticisms and improvements to this structure and process.

recommendations for people to fill roles (including yourself).

[Dave, especially: You have seen what works and doesn't for such organizations. Please feel free to rewrite anything here]

Meanwhile I will draft a couple of the committee charters for consideration, and pull together some of the recent and not-so-recent project proposals. I'll also dig up my draft of cooperative charters for SqF and SqC.

Let's try to complete this interim spec by this Friday.

Thanks, all

- Dan

[If you know anyone who is interested but out of communication for a few days, perhaps you could alert them to this process, or at least tell me that we may be missing them during this period]