Squeak in commercial use.

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Sun Oct 17 11:14:32 UTC 2004


On Oct 17, 2004, at 11:12 AM, Hans N Beck wrote:

> My questions are:
>
>  - what is the acceptance of colleagues to use squeak (if they were no 
> fans before, of course ;-) as programmers or even as users ?
> - what is the acceptance of management ?
> - what was the main reason to use squeak or what was the  killing 
> argument to convince the disbeliver ?
> - is there any chance to sell products not looking like produced with 
> MS Visual Studio ?

One argument that has helped me in the past is the "self-sufficiency" 
argument - when you're building an app with a commercial Smalltalk, you 
are dependent on the Smalltalk vendor (Cincom, IBM, Object Arts), and 
possibly on the operating system vendor (Microsoft).  If they change 
the licensing terms of the product you're using, that can mean trouble. 
  With Squeak, you have control really all the way down, in that the 
environment will always be free, and it is so trivial to port to a new 
platform that even if all existing operating systems disappeared you'd 
still be ok.

As for the rest of your questions, that'll depend a lot on how friendly 
programmers/management already are to Smalltalk, and to open source, 
and on what kind of a product you're building...

Avi




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