Convincing a harvester (was on SqF list)

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Wed May 7 06:29:51 UTC 2003


On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 03:27, Andreas Raab wrote:
> What I feel _really_ unhappy about is the complete absence of any vision
> (and action) which goes beyound "hack it up in small bits".
>
Well, that *is* the strategy. One I'm all in favour of. 

Until now, Squeak was a multimedia thing in which some people happened
to do other things, like use it as an application server (where you
obviously don't need TTF support, B3D, etcetera). This was the sole goal
of SqC, and therefore that was where Squeak was taken.

When SqC stepped back, the application server and 'classical software
development' people lobbied in order to have their wishes granted - a
leaner base to work from, more modularity so you could pick&choose,
etcetera. 

The resolution of these conflicting interests was to start to see Squeak
as a platform, and to learn from another platform a lot of us like -
Linux - that it *is* possible to be everything to everybody (at least to
a very large extent) just by hacking it up in small bits *and* ensuring
that distribution building from these small bits works reliable. 

So if you ask me "what is the implicit strategic vision behind what
we're currently attempting to do", it is (ugly buzzword warning) to
redefine Squeak as a platform (an operating system done right) which is
distributed, by default, as a rich personal multimedia environment.

The end result for 3.7 should be that the default download image
(kitchensink, in cdegrootspeak) from Squeak.org should look *exactly* as
it looks now (or hopefully with much more useful bits thrown in, like
full TTF support), but that it is recognizably built up from smaller
bits and that these smaller bits are also individually available,
together with the mini-image which was the base for the default
distribution. 

The beauty of such a platform is that it allows different strategic
visions to coexist, so after this whole exercise hopefully special
interest groups pop up that take care of leading various distributions
in the way they most benefit from; I assume that one major interest
group will form around formerly SqC which will keep pursuing the
multimedia angle. Where 'their' interests compete with 'other'
interests, it will be a matter of politics to decide who 'wins', but if
we get the tools and the platform vision good, that'll be a rare
incident (and with a large chance of the multimedia guys winning, no-one
wants to go into the history books as standing in the way of the success
of Croquet etcetera ;-)).

 


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