Stef,

I agree.  It seems to me that Java is Smalltalk strongly typed and with a
business model to attract corporations and Server Vendors.  There is a model
which allows private companies to make money offering small changes to a
standard reference model and charge large consulting fees.  It's an
interesting model that attracted a lot of money and hype.  They are also
requiring companies certify their servers.  They are charging money to do
it, and then they can say Java Certified.  It's an interesting model, but it
requires someone to do the work of certification and testing (not to mention
the liability for doing it wrong).

There is a lot of good will money out there too from corporations.  Is sqf a
register non-profit in the US?  If it is then there are some problems that
we would have to be very careful of.  Mostly the foundation can not benefit
any private entity.   Otherwise you could loose your non-profit status and
encounter major fines.  For example, if Oracle gave you a bunch of money and
we all set out to build the oracle dll support and maybe incorporate their
business objects, we would be in big trouble.

Money and development make sense; there should be a plan to go after real
corporate support and money here in the US.  We need a business plan.

I believe that smalltalk is extremely powerful, and terrifically fun!  The
foundation is the right way to go.  What better project is there?

(I'm not trying to lecture or make it sound difficult, it's just a
suggestion.  I wish I had more time but I'm working on building a new
company.  So I'll try to stay lurking, until I can offer something more
concrete)

Ron

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it!"  <- I really like that
Stef.


-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of stéphane
ducasse
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 12:52 PM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Re: [Newbee] Salutations

>
>> 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