Bert,

First of all, let me say a word about not mentioning the contributions of
others. When I wrote my message I was trying to make a specific point about
personalities. There are some people (including me, as you of all people
should know ;-) that have a very, very strong feeling about the ownership of
"their" code. This is important to understand if one is talking about making
those people's code free to modifications by others. It's like letting
people cook in your own kitchen - it's okay as long as you are present but
that doesn't mean I'd hang out the key of my house for everyone to cook in
that very kitchen. As you may (or may not) know, there have been constant
contributions to the Windows sources. However, my style of dealing with the
contributions is that I prefer getting a message with the source code and a
diff to the original versions attached. That's just the way I like it.

On the issue of Ian's "long absence" you will understand that I won't
comment on it. So let me just say that for one thing, there have been longer
periods (several months) of my absence during which no new Windows VMs were
posted and I believe that everyone who is involved in such a project for a
long enough time will have phases during which one is either too busy or
simply too tired of doing the necessary work.

Finally, let me add one important point that seemingly everyone has
overlooked so far. Up to now, I have not been contacted by anyone who was
asking the question "So why aren't you using SF?!". Nobody asked me about
this issue - there just seemed to be this expectation that I would have to
use it. Which makes me wonder if anyone ever asked Ian about how he feels?!
The only reason why I wrote the reply on Stephans message was to explain why
it currently doesn't seem to work for me (and Peter, if I'd just wanted to
dismiss the idea because it wasn't coming from the "VM mafia" I wouldn't
have written the reply in the first place). As I said in that message, I
can't speak for others - but perhaps you should ask them?!

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bert Freudenberg [mailto:bert at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de]
> Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 1:27 PM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Cc: 'Stephan Rudlof'; Tim Rowledge; Ian Piumarta; Ingalls, Dan; Raab,
> Andreas; John M McIntosh
> Subject: RE: [SF][VM] SF for VMs: Phoenix out of ashes?
> 
> 
> Andreas,
> 
> from your point of view this all may be valid. And for users of the
> Windows port the situation never was really bad. There was a 
> period of not up-to-date sources, but at least the VM was there.
> 
> For us Unixers it's pretty hard to live with Ian's long periods of
> absence. The last official release is 2.7. It took ages for a 
> successor of the 2.7 VM, which ultimately led to the SF CVS being created.

> 2.8 still is not released. 2.9pre1 never saw any update. With 3.0pre1 
> we're pretty much on par with the rest again, but it would have been
> nice if Ian had announced he's working on it. Both, Stefan Matthias Aust
> and Ned Konz started implementing 3.0 themselves because we did not hear 
> from Ian. It's all the same again (although fortunately this time it was 
> only a couple of days, not months).
> 
> Moving sources to SourceForge is not only about "not knowing 
> where to go get the sources" (although having all sources for all
> platforms in one place would be a great plus). We went through
> all that discussion last time. SF is for *coordinating* the
> efforts of independent developers. The main developers still
> would be the only ones releasing versions. 
> 
> Of course, this only works if the main developers actually 
> *want* others to contribute. You wrote a lot about how you
> don't like us to mess with your sources. There wasn't a single
> line inviting us to participate, which I found quite unfortunate.
> 
> I'm not saying SF is absolutely necessary to make Squeak VM 
> development a successful open source project. But it did help
> hundreds of other projects, and I don't see what's so special
> about Squeak that it wouldn't work for us. Perhaps you could
> comment on if and how you imagine others to take part in
> Squeak development?
> 
> -- Bert
>