This is my personal suggestion for somethings the Squeak Foundation
could do for us.

Your Mileage May Vary. Contents sold by weight not volume. Not
responsible for items left on carriage. Close cover before striking.

The key facility I see a foundation providing is a single, easy to deal
with point of contact for people wanting to use Squeak without the
excitement of being test-pilots.

One part of this would be a well kept, regularly maintained web presence
that gathers together all the appropriate pieces and provides clear
concise help on getting them downloaded, installed and started with.
Virtually all these are available somewhere or other, but not in a nice
clean package. A well thought out bunch of tutorials would make getting
started in the squeak life much easier. Several good tutorials exist;
combine them as appropriate to make a great one. A decent repository of
sources to up to date VM and plugin components is needed; I imagine a
CVS database would be a good way to provide that, but whatever is best
should be used. This is not to take anything in the way of control away
from people that provide the main porting work, more to make sure a
clean, tracked, known good set of sources is available to all. A
collection of known good projects/fileins/goodies is needed, along with
documentation to explain them.

If possible some reasonable first line tech support would be nice; it
would at minimum save people from feeling embarassed to ask 'dumb
newbie' questions to the list at large.

An important activity would be feeding bug fixes and useful improvements
from the test-pilot school into the mainstream stable system. This can
be hard work, since things can rapidly drift apart, so a lot of care and
testing and knowledge of the system is required. At suitable points, the
stable system mantle can be migrated to a subsequent system. Deciding
when to do this can be tricky. Improvements in modularity and the tools
to manage it would help a lot, and some of this work is already being
done with the StableSqueak project. For people to feel like trusting
Squeak for commercial work, or simply work that is important to them, it
needs some fairly serious engineering to tease out loopholes, snip off
loose ends, fill in potholes etc.

With decent funding a foundation might be able to sponsor students to
OOPSLA/ Smalltalk Solutions etc, support the GaTech Swiki, even perhaps
run a conference. Maybe provide some money to encourage articles about
Squeak in the general press. Hey, even more nice badges, neat
sweatshirts and cool posters!

I think the foundation could be a really useful entity. I've already
spent non-trivial time working on the idea with Dave and others (who can
unmask themselves as and when they wish) and I'm happy to spend more
time on it. I hope you are, too.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
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