A true community license

We are using Jruby in the context of an SOA implementation i.e. a micro service that has persistence needs , there’s no UI involved per se. I’m accustomed to either doing REST or often loading a Java jar into Jruby and using Jruby’s much terser and arguably more ST like syntax to leverage whatever Java comm lib.

So trying to wrap Gemstone/S C libs or using CGI is a level of pain that I would not be used to or feel necessary in the context of what’s generally available today. 

In other words I feel that Gembuilder/J should be available in some sort of open-source , free at least under certain circumstances scenario. Gemstone/S has a lot to offer but and many more may consider it if they could play with it without all that pain. That means folks used to leveraging JVM based languages at least the enterprise devs and therefore that means a Java lib.

I thought I saw the blurb about licensing and it just directed me to talk to my Gemstone/S Sales rep, but I will check your link.

Re: Mongo and Redis, what I mean to say is that if I want to use either of these DB technologies I can very easily do so and from typical modern ways without constraints. I know you all have to eat but I’m sorry this just reminds me of why Smalltalk got relegated back to the island it was born from, the balloon deflated under all the weight that vendors have burdened it with.

Re: my Seaside comment, what I was alluding to was that I am aware one can leverage Gemstone / S from Seaside but that I did not want to use Seaside to front an RPC protocol to my app.

Recap:

You all should make Gembuilder/J libs free and should consider that you will make your money once a project deploys a large enough installation of Gemstone/S , never mind consulting fees from onboarded projects.

Hope all is well

thanks

Charles

On December 1, 2016 at 12:10:44 PM, James Foster ([hidden email]) wrote:

Hi Charles,

On Dec 1, 2016, at 7:55 AM, Charles Monteiro via GemStone-Smalltalk <[hidden email]> wrote:

given that all Gemstone clients require licenses i.e. VW , VA and GBJ i.e. there are fees associated with any of these paths, therefore it can be said that there's really no real free solution that can be used to test out ideas , a problem that has plagued Smalltalk since folks decided to venture out of the Xerox Parc labs. 

You are right that Cincom and Instantiations both charge for commercial use of their products (as far as I know). You can use the Community Edition license of GemStone/S 64 Bit with other clients, including Pharo and Dolphin, or even Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc., by using the included GCI interface and the client’s FFI.

Note that it is not the model of any new modern databases i.e. the Mongo and Redis's of this new brave world.

You are right that Mongo and Redis do not map well to Smalltalk objects.

So how crazy expensive is a GBJ license anyhow ?

To learn more about GemStone licenses, see https://gemtalksystems.com/licensing/.

oh, and pls correct me if I have missed something except for telling me to do Seaside dev, since what I would be contemplating would be providing persistence to an app cluster.

What is it about "providing persistence to an app cluster" that makes it incompatible with a web-based UI?

thanks

--

Charles 

Regards,

James

Nice to from you Charles, it has been a long time.

Norm might give a good reply to your post that shows continuing efforts. There always had been limits to what a person in his position could do. This discussion would need attention from higher management than this forum is likely to reach.

Remember Enfin? Enfin was one of the early Smalltalk dialects. As a college student around 1992 I'd called for a license so that I could use this wonderful technology that I'd read about. I was told cheerfully that a student license was only sixty-nine ninety-five. I grabbed my credit card, how could it be so low I asked. ... Oh, $6995 ... for a one user license to a student. They didn't stay in business long. I instead paid two months of rent to learn Digitalk/V. Most students went the $89 Borland C route. Today the model is to pay $20 per month to a company like Adobe for access to all their products, a suite that must continue to improve by hired staff. Tomorrow belongs to the Linux price and development model, a model where users can fork development toward new opportunities.

From my perspective GemTalk has survived so long because technical people actually understood how amazingly superior the development process was and the performance that is possible. It helped that passionate engineers were able to seed the product through non-commercial use licenses. The deep pocket customers carry the company, and those diminish over time from cost saving directives. Maybe Dale's wonderful efforts can root another decade of talent and startups. The GLASS group has life signs. It is interesting to see them face all too familiar development challenges.

I always had hopes that GemTalk could make a transition with their pricing and development model. We've seen them directed to chase trends. We've also seen organic attempts to bridge between models. The GS/S core has carried the company through many times, there is real value there that most of the world has never heard about.

I had stopped using Squeak years ago because it evolved too quickly and often broke core functionality. With highly dynamic systems there is a problem that no release is really useful, and it only works for people involved in development who work toward release. There are solutions, but it needs both leadership and ownership to make the change. I suspect the key is in showing where the squeak model can be made to work, and that comes by looking at Linux.

Paul Baumann