[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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