>
>> The foundation needs very experienced business people, some  
>> promotions and education focused to encourage corporate  
>> acceptance, and a solid and growing user community producing a  
>> strong capable business development platform.  We all know that  
>> smalltalk is just as capable (if not more) but the business world,  
>> and it’s consultants like Gartner Group, sees us as risky.
>>
> yes, I'd really like to see (more) common actions of people using  
> Squeak professionally (its certainly good to become a supporting  
> company at SqueakFoundation but if we also manage to do real  
> actions, that is even better!). There are certainly a couple of  
> companies that mainly do Squeak development - I guess, most in the  
> Seaside area. I'm sure that all Squeakers can profit if we manage  
> to attract more business users. I mean, for example Monticello was  
> implemented because it was just not reasonable anymore to manage  
> source code with change sets in a project with more than two  
> developers.
>
> There are many areas where Squeak could be enhanced to be more  
> powerful as a business platform: for example development tools  
> (with Shout, eCompletion and others we already made a big step  
> forward), core libraries (e.g., the implementation of collections  
> is very bad in respect to performance if they are big enough),  
> persistency (e.g., we use OmniBase but run into corruption problems  
> (probably related to the VM). If OmniBase was more used under  
> "real" conditions, new users would have more security that it works  
> reliably) etc. etc. There are certainly many more possibilities and  
> needs...
>
> How can we best push the "professionalization" and attraction of  
> new users? I agree with Ron that SqueakFoundation would provide a  
> good structure - its goals definitely are about this already. What  
> I think is crucial and for now missing are committed people taking  
> action and helping to push!

We need two things:
     - people willing to take initiative
     - money

Our goal is really to be able to pay people to fix problems. Now we  
do not know exactly how we can do it so that
it does not damage the community. But we will find a solution.

Stef