Commercial Smalltalks deserve our support too (Was: www.squeak.org finally updated)

Alan Knight knight at acm.org
Mon Jul 4 15:28:04 UTC 2005


At 10:14 AM 7/4/2005, David T. Lewis wrote:
>In my opinion it would be very bad for Squeak to be seen as a
>competitor to the commercial systems, and very good for Squeak if
>the commercial systems grow in credibility thanks to the positive
>contributions of the Squeak community.

I don't think competition is necessarily a bad thing. Squeak, and other 
commercial Smalltalks, naturally compete with Cincom Smalltalk, as well as 
with each other. In that sense they're competitors. But they also compete 
with all other development possibilities out there, which is a much larger 
space. In that space, they help and complement each other, by growing 
overall Smalltalk usage. Even within the purely Smalltalk space, 
competition helps force the others to always improve.

It's possible to have destructive competition, and I think that's something 
to be avoided. The metaphor I like to use is a couple of people stuck in a 
lifeboat, and spending all their time hitting each other with the oars 
instead of rowing. But competition as far as who can row the fastest only 
benefits everyone.

Avi made a point about market share, but market share is not really the 
important metric. Cincom would, I expect, be delighted to have a smaller 
market share of a larger market, and I would expect that to be an normal 
consequence of a growing market.

Note: I work for, but in no way speak for, Cincom.


--
Alan Knight [|], Cincom Smalltalk Development
knight at acm.org
aknight at cincom.com
http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk

"The Static Typing Philosophy: Make it fast. Make it right. Make it run." - 
Niall Ross




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