VSE - my personal view on the topic

Hi Frank

Migrating from VSE to LSWVST (or any other Smalltalk on the market) would be very hard without some sort of agreement with Cincom & Seagull Software.

The licensing issues with VSE is not only about the VM. There are lots of other issues:

How much of the base library are you allowed to transfer/port to another dialect without violating the license.

Large part of the VSE framework is closed source and you have to reverse engineer it in order to emulate it on another dialect, this is illegal in some parts of the world.

The current contracts (and NDA’s) that people have signed with Cincom and/or Seagull – some of these actually forbids people to share code, bug fixes and knowledge.

Bottom line: VSE customers cannot do anything without Cincom releasing its control of them.

	Henrik Høyer
	Chief Software Architect
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From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Lesser
Sent: 3. september 2010 09:56
To: 'The general-purpose Squeak developers list'
Subject: [squeak-dev] VSE - my personal view on the topic

Most companies using VSE have developed & enhanced their frameworks over the time since VSE was declared moribund.

To move such an application which is in most cases a Windows GUI based application requiring deep OS-Integration to a different Smalltalk dialect is technically very difficult.

The alternative to get a VSE-application updated would be to obtain a license for our LSW Virtual-Machine. We do not license our LSW Vision-Smalltalk. LSWVST is running on our latest VM but the efforts migrating a complex Windows-Smalltalk application to an entirely different Smalltalk framework is not feasible & we want to concentrate as a small company on developing & marinating our VM.

Running a VSE application on our VM requires very few changes.

To be legally save you need be a VSE licensee.

I don’t think that it makes sense for Cincom to try to stop VSE-customers to use a different VM for existing VSE-applications.

Actually our VM helps Cincom to sell VSE-licenses. Cincom is a huge company & while some managers can try to tell their customers some things – I see that - for me relevant people at Cincom do the right thing mentioning our product in public & as a side effect promoting it.

While I personally disliked the idea to open-source VSE or any other commercial Smalltalk, I also see the drive of companies demanding it.

Companies have obtained the VSE-VM source in the past & where only able to do marginal changes as to correct small bugs & extending the FFI.

I doubt that VM-developers (except one I know) in those companies are able to develop it further (e.g. produce a 64-bit version or move to a different platform or processor architecture).

Also patching & reverse-engineering VSE is the poor-companies way & is IMO also irrelevant for Cincom because they could not expect any business from those people.

People who are posting VM-bugs (hoping that VSE hackers provide free patches) and at the same time complaining ijn public that Cincom do not provide them with a corrected VM are probably not paying Cincom for it.

There are free alternatives if Windows GUI integration isn’t required – for Squeak & its friends exists now a more powerful faster VM - the COG-VM.

And IMO it is a sane state for the Smalltalk-community in the whole that commercial & free alternatives exist.

Alejandro F. Reimondo – a well known Smalltalk-specialist (especially in the VSE area) has joined us a few years ago - & is helping companies to prepare their products to run on our VM.

The VSE-VM has not being developed since a decade – we have developed our VM since more than a decade and are actively developing it not only to run Smalltalk dialects.

So companies which want to obtain a license for using our VM are invited to contact us.

Frank Lesser, Lesser-Software