RE: [Esug-list] Is Cincom slowly killing Visual Smalltalk Enterprice

Dear all

From the reactions to my post, I fear that people might have misunderstood me. Bear in mind, that I am not a native English speaker – though my language might sound harsh and offensive, I do have the best intensions.

The subject of the original post should perhaps have been: “Is Cincom slowly killing Visual Smalltalk Enterprise *customers*”. Who shot VSE a long time ago is another discussion. As are the discussion of how/whether one could/should port the applications to other Smalltalk dialects.

My focus is entirely on how the current VSE users can extend the life of their applications on the VSE platform. Even though development on VSE stopped more than 10 years ago, the applications are still running today on current operating system versions and with on-par performance.

Part of VSE is closed source; The VM, the compiler and several other stuff. Though clever hacking/patching bugs in these closed parts of VSE have been fixes by the community since the official development stopped. But Cincom (who has the exclusive rights to make money from supporting the product) has now unleashed its lawyers, and are threatening some of the most active people in the community. The amount of “lawyer muscle” behind the threats are actually keeping people from even replying to this post.

I did have a deep respect for Cincom; they have done a great job for the Smalltalk community. I don’t know where in their organization the “money matters more than ethics” policy is in action. It is not among the Smalltalk people we all know, but the ones who are pulling the strings are in fact doing a lot of damage to their corporate image.

I know that some Cincom employees have commented on my post, but I still have had no answers to the main question:

Are Cincom willing to donate/sell their “exclusive exploratory rights to the VSE product”?

Please note: The question is not about the IP. It is only about the rights that Cincom holds, oh and by the way; are Cincom willing to disclose the contact they have with Seagull regarding these rights?

With all the best intensions