"Peter Crowther" <Peter at ozzard.org> writes:

>> From: [...] stéphane ducasse
>> Because right now I put my name on 3.9 and I want it to work.
>
> That's fine.  Other people have put their names on other variants,
> such as SqueakLight, Spoon, Tweak...  The Squeak community *has*
> fragmented; development *has* de-facto forked - the biggest fork
> being pushing traits into one version. 

I totally agree. In fact, smalltalk itself has fragmented a long time
ago, and this process is only ongoing, both for smalltalk and human
beings themselves (which is the root of the problem). There is not a
united smalltalk as there is not a unified human species : each
smalltalkers live in their own countries, and in each country we are
re-inventing the wheel (or readaptating it with great
difficulties). When some of us tried to make something which could
work between different smalltalk, as Lukas did for smallwiki, only one
version later and code is broken. Breaking compatibilities is not
really a problem for me, but for each version it is pathologic.

Sounds sometimes as if each squeak version were a little fork.  The
squeak core owners says : "redesign your package each time, this is
your work not us". Again, I put into question that and also the fact
that the squeak core should be owned. It sounds for me that there is
one of these packages, called squeak, which became monopolistic and
dictates its own law by stating that breaking compatibility is not a
problem : it sounds like a microsoft strategy ! This is really amazing
I find.

It seems also that there is no listening, and that squeak is really
owned by some people, because they can control, and we can only
suggest. Of course, they can say : "just enter into our team, you can
control too (with conditions I guess)", but I definitely put into
question all this story of control. I would like to be clear : there
is a huge work done by reviewers, and of great and useful quality. I
simply put into question the way we are doing this : are we really on
the right track ? Are we able to put our own way of working together
into question or do we say : no, no, I'm right, you're wrong and point
?

Samir