[squeak-dev] Election campaign and a vision of the future of Squeak
part 1
Merik Voswinkel
macmerik at xs4all.nl
Sun Apr 3 20:14:49 UTC 2011
Hi Squeakers,
Several people asked for a vision on the future of Squeak and some
campaigning on current Squeak issues.
I'll attempt to start that with a first post about my own views and I
invite everyone to engage in a discussion.
There should always be an official Squeak in my opinion. The board
exists to represent the official Squeak release and the community
behind it.
The Squeak Oversight Board is elected from among a subset of
registered that read and post on the Squeak-dev mailing list with the
purpose of representing the people. The Board currently releases the
official versions, coordinates some trunk development, protects the
Squeak name, manages the web hosting, the domain names, arranges the
license, receives funding and correspondence, represents Squeak to
other organizations and could make deals with others. The board has
not much power and no way to make things happen beyond convincing us
readers to volunteer our time. I think that this limited power and
scope is appropriate for the Board.
I think that this limited role for the board is good. If people would
want to make the Squeak Oversight Board into an organization with more
powers or return to the days of Squeak Central, I think we need a long
and wide discussion beyond the mailing lists scope before we start
voting on such issues. If others want to make Squeak into a big
successful development project like Linux or OLPC even more
discussions and careful thought needs to take place before I would
agree to support such a big change. In the many years we have seen the
results of Squeak forks by other types of organizations like a vocal
group of strong individuals, user groups, science institutes,
universities and companies with varying success. The Open source
Squeak community and it's board should be careful before abandoning
the current arrangement where everyone can vote with there actions on
what should happen.
The people on this list, approximately 1400 subscribers, are only of
subset of active developers of Squeak and only a fraction of Squeaks
users.
I think that we can safely say that the Squeak community is much
larger then the 460 voters on this list.
I estimate over half a million Squeakers if you include casual
endusers of the Scratch, Etoys, OLPC en other communities.
If you define even more loosely, Squeak is the current open source
version and descendant of Smalltalk, with a 43 year history going back
to 1972 at Xerox PARC and to Alan Kay's Dynabook from 1968.
I foremost want to represent the wants, needs and opinions of this
larger group of Squeak users, by definition not the people who can
vote. I actually believe that most voters, mostly active programmers
and developers, have the same needs and wants. We voters just have a
few more needs as developers and power users.
I am personally convinced that Squeak and is successors can have a big
impact on the future of the internet and the entire computing
landscape if we choose to make it happen.
I think that with our combined effort, we can bring Squeak to everyone
on the planet in the next decade. I have been called a dreamer because
of this and I am proud of it. If you at first do not dream about a
better future Squeak, you can not even begin to define and build it,
let alone make it a reality.
To me personally, a much evolved version of Squeak has the potential
to replace Windows, iOS/Mac OS X and the Linux/BSD/Android computing
platforms. With a mature Lively Kernel/Clamato/Advocado we can
redefine the World Wide Web and a mature Croquet/OpenCobalt we can
redefine the internet user interface entirely.
The best platform to evolve and redefine users interfaces like kinect,
multitouch, speech and other 'natural user interfaces' is also Squeak,
especially some evolved Morphic.
The best way to move to such a future is to 'make something people
want'. That does not mean 'make something the Squeak developers want'
or even 'what people say they want'. In my opinion we can define on
this list what we think what 'people want' and with that as a start,
design a development roadmap and then actually make 'something people
want'. But the Squeak Oversight Board is only here to facilitate such
an effort, not to make it happen.
My second post will contain my personal vision on the future of
Squeak. Or dreamy weird ideas as some call them.
Please all vote!
Cheers,
Merik
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