Putting squeak in business.

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Nov 17 01:16:43 UTC 2003


On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 05:35:09PM -0800, Alan Grimes wrote:
> Hello, 
> 
> Today I'm writing as an entrepreneur trying to assemble a business plan.
> I'm trying to guage how much it would cost/how much you would charge to
> accomplish the following two milestones: 
> 
> 1. make a bootable, self-building (no more C) VM for a reasonably
> well-designed machine (that is not a PC). including a filesystem and
> interrupt driven IO. 

Why would your business plan require this, rather than just use a
minimal Linux (or whatever OS will run on your hardware), especially
since people like Mike Rueger and Dan Ingalls have already been
working on this?  

> 
> 2. make scamper W3C compliant and give it sufficient capabilities to be
> a viable if not prefferable alternative to Internet Exploder. 
> 

I don't think that you could do this economically.  Look at how much
work has gone into various other open source web browsers... how much
would eg: Konqueror cost to develop if it wasn't done by volunteers?
Even if you divide that cost by 5 (because Squeak is so great), you
still wouldn't want to pay it.

If I had to do this, I would figure out how to embed Gecko or some
other free html renderer into Squeak, not how to write it from
scratch.

> All I need is a ballpark, not necessarily a specific quote.

$250000 for the pair, if you're very lucky

(Based on USA wages.  Bear in mind that I'm not the guy for this, so
my figure may not be too accurate)

I'm curious to hear others' guesses.


Joshua


> 
> -- thanx. =) 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Windows 3.11: Almost exactly 10 years old,
>      and -400% slower than windows XP. ;) 
> 
> http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/



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