Funding (was re: JIT)

Bryce Kampjes bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk
Sat Dec 18 15:36:26 UTC 2004


Avi Bryant writes:
 > And, come to think of it, there is a potentially interesting network
 > effect from having a free JIT for Squeak, which is that you may
 > attract more people to Squeak itself - if you could say "Squeak is as
 > fast as Java" and mean it, Squeak might grab some market share it
 > wouldn't have otherwise, which would, among other things, increase the
 > profile/reputation/employability of the JIT implementor.  This might
 > be worth more in the long run than the (<1 ?) licenses you would have
 > sold.

I'm all for the network effects of having a free JIT.

I suspect that the only sensible model for a JIT is one that involves
selling services and giving the JIT away.

However, there are more Smalltalks than Squeak. I dual licence
MIT/SqueakL for a reason. Both Cygnus and the MIT consortium built
businesses developing open source products before open source was
either cool or acceptable. The Smalltalk market needs to grow which
means working with the other dialects as well.

If you're in a job market it makes more difference if it's growing or
shrinking than how big it is. If it's growing there will be more jobs
than experienced people year after year. If it's shrinking there will
be less. One thing we have is room to grow.

If we could say "We're competing with C not Java for speed" and mean
it, that would probably grab mind share. That would take a year or
two full time.

Building the infrastructure to raise donations/sell CDs at a profit
would be really nice. But it would be much more sensible to hire
people to do what Marcus was doing first before funding JITs. And to
write end user documentation. Or to fund Stef to talk all the PHP
people into using Seaside instead.

Bryce



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