[squeak-dev] We want Cog! We want Cog! And some political blabbering...

Göran Krampe goran at krampe.se
Fri Jan 8 09:02:20 UTC 2010


Hi all!

<rant level=5>

Ok, so I was sitting in my car on the way to work this morning, 
thinking. Well, ok, to be honest I was first sitting up half night 
surfing about VMs and implementation techniques, etc, for fun, as usual. 
:) And chatting on a swedish channel about VM tech, LLVM, Parrot, JITs, 
Forth implementations yadda yadda etc.

So... I have two questions:

1. When do we get the first Cog? :) We already know there is a working 
version.

2. Why is Cog not being developed in an open repo?

Perhaps someone already explained #2, but then I forgot. Since Cog is 
meant to be released as open source (I presume) then I don't get why we 
can't have access to the work in progress. Or is the decision not really 
made yet? Is Teleplace going to decide later? Or is Teleplace worried of 
"tech theft" or something similar?

I don't get it.

And please don't give us the:

"It is too early, we want it to be juuuust right before releasing it to 
all you people who don't understand these kind of things and just mess 
it all up if you, eh, get read access to it... ehm."

Let me be utterly frank about some "politics" here:

You Andreas is putting a whole lot of new energy into Squeak.org, which 
is a blessing for sure! I love that. But I can't help wondering slightly 
over the "politics" behind that effort - your time is NOT cheap - I am 
pretty certain you are important within Teleplace.

My guess is that Squeak tech is very important to Teleplace and you 
really need Squeak.org (and it's cousins) to be live and well etc, and 
given the rise of Pharo, where you don't have anything near the same 
influence, I also presume this issue suddenly got "critical". ;)

This is all fine and perfectly natural btw, don't read anything 
suspicious into what I am writing (sorry for the bad english). Now, 
given all this - why are you holding Cog under a cloak?

We all know how open source works and we all know that One Man (although 
his name is Eliot) can't match the strength of a strong open source 
team. You need to build a community/team around Cog, you can't just dump 
it on us and then expect all the Igors and Davids etc to dig in and 
learn it! It doesn't work that way, it takes time to grow a team and 
every day that Cog is under wraps is another day wasted growing that team.
</rant>

Phew. :)

regards, Göran

PS. Slightly annoyed with the "Sure, we like open source, ehm, when 
other people do it..." and hoping there is some other perfectly good and 
viable explanation for the secrecy.




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