[squeak-dev] Election 2008: Answers from Yoshiki

  Hello,

1. Approximately, how much time do you plan on spending on Squeak during the
   coming year (in any kind of unit)?

    I will be still spending some chunk of my time constantly on the
    development of OLPC Etoys.  Also, for making prototypes of new UI
    and end-user application, I'll be using Squeak (probably the OLPC
    Etoys image).  In the longer term, though, VPRI trys to roll out
    new system that are not based on Squeak.  I'll be working on these
    projects.

2. What are in your mind the three most important issues (not necessarily
   technical) we need to address in the coming year?

    Giving somebody(s) the authority of making technical dicisions
    would be important to move the community.

3. What is your view on fund raising and how any such collected money should
   be dealt with?

    For small chunks, simple donations from individuals members in the
    community would be good.  But honestly I don't see some entity
    that offers bigger funding toward Squeak itself.  There will be
    funding for projects that may use Squeak, but only if these
    projects are attractive.

4. What is your view on the ongoing process of making SqueakFoundation a
   not-for-profit legal entity?

    It is making progress and I hope it goes through.  At the same
    time, even if it doesn't go through, that wouldn't be a disaster.
    It is people's willingness that drives the community.

5. Do you think the Team model is appropriate for organising our efforts or
   should we come up with something else?

    Team would work better if there is still a leader.

6. Do you have any specific views on how the Squeak board and the Squeak
   community should work together with the Squeak satellite communities
   (Croquet, Seaside, Sophie, Squeakland, Scratch etc), also referred to as
   "stakeholder communities"?

    Share the contributions and insights.  Something like DeltaStream,
    which increases the visibility of other people's patches and let
    us cherry pick them would be good.

    I don't see a real merging effort of them will happen, though.  I
    wouldn't even think about such effort with the OLPC Etoys image
    and the mainstream image.

7. The squeak.org release is our most important asset. How do you see it
   evolving over the next few years?

    For various reasons such as licensing and people's feeling toward
    minimum systems, I'd think that we would have two systems.  One is
    based on a kind of small system that remotely related to current
    "Squeak".  And another is maintenance versions of current
    image(s).  The former should have cleaner license, but I think it
    is ok to distribute the latter even if some people think that the
    license is murky.

8. Do you have any thoughts on the current relicensing effort?

    I personally think that the license issue is overrated in the open
    source software community.  Anybody can sue anybody after all for
    anything, so there is no way to achieve "100%" cleanness in this
    world.  Nonetheless, we should try to do some "reasonable effort"
    to relicensing.  And, like the Japanese versions and other
    languages version of Squeak and Squeakland, people wouldn't stop
    using, and that wouldn't be a problem.

9. How would you like Squeak to be positioned in the open source world in year
   2012?

    An honest answer is that something much better comes out from the
    project at VPRI and the many members of Squeak community move on
    to it.

10. What do you see as the overall role of the board?

    Sometimes being at the Viewpoints helps, and knowing the POV of
    other language communities such as the largeer Japanese Squeak
    community helps.

-- Yoshiki

Same question Craig do to Tansel, how much time will you have to spend on Squeak
independently of your work priorities?

Thanks.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoshiki Ohshima" <[hidden email]>
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.general
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:17 AM
Subject: Election 2008: Answers from Yoshiki


>  Hello,
...
> 9. How would you like Squeak to be positioned in the open source world in
> year
>   2012?
>
>    An honest answer is that something much better comes out from the
>    project at VPRI and the many members of Squeak community move on
>    to it.
>
...

This makes me very curious...
Is  this referring to the Pesi/Coke thing ?

Could you / someone tell more about this?


     -Jeroen

Hi Yoshiki--

 > > 9. How would you like Squeak to be positioned in the open source
 > > world in year 2012?
 >
 > An honest answer is that something much better comes out from the
 > project at VPRI and the many members of Squeak community move on to
 > it.

      Why should anyone bother with Squeak in the meantime?


-C

>  > > 9. How would you like Squeak to be positioned in the open source
>  > > world in year 2012?
>  >
>  > An honest answer is that something much better comes out from the
>  > project at VPRI and the many members of Squeak community move on to
>  > it.
>
>       Why should anyone bother with Squeak in the meantime?

  Why?  Because it is a good platform to experiment what a new system
should be like, as I wrote in the same message.  In that sense, it is
a viable platform, and of course for those who are building commercial
software and using Squeak in industry already (like ourselves for
OLPC), it does not alway make sense just jump to a new unproven
system.   Even after the new system gets real, why shouldn't anyone
bother with Squeak?

-- Yoshiki

Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>   Why?  Because it is a good platform to experiment what a new system
> should be like, as I wrote in the same message.  In that sense, it is
> a viable platform, and of course for those who are building commercial
> software and using Squeak in industry already (like ourselves for
> OLPC), it does not alway make sense just jump to a new unproven
> system.   Even after the new system gets real, why shouldn't anyone
> bother with Squeak?
>  
Plus Squeak will always have the cutest splash screen in the world of
open source.

--
Jeffrey Straszheim
http://straszheim.50megs.com

On Feb 28, 2008, at 21:19 , Jeroen van Hilst wrote:

I recommend to read this first, and the papers on the site, and then  
ask more concretely:

        http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

- Bert -

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
And I would really recommend that everyone in the Squeak community read
the first paper in the "articles" link on that page. The 50 page report,
called "Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming", shows the results
of the first year of their five year NSF mission (to explore strange new
representations, to seek out new objects and new transformations, to
boldly go where no nerd has gone before...)

http://vpri.org/pdf/steps_TR-2007-008.pdf

I have not seen about half of what is described here mentioned anywhere
else, even on the fonc mailing list. It would be fun to have some more
information about this stuff. I enjoyed figuring out Chuck Thacker's
neat FPGA processor, for example, since I had been discussing this kind
of thing with three friends (separately, unfortunately) since last
November. The "self expanding" Cairo reminded me of Henryk's AspectBlit
and is very important work.

Cheers,
-- Jecel

Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: I tried to read this document on the XO and it is extremely slow to
load, and the XO reports it as a .doc

Karl

On Mar 1, 2008, at 16:26 , karl wrote:

It shows as .pdf for me (on build 693). You might report the slowness  
as a ticket for the Read activity.

- Bert -

On Mar 1, 2008, at 17:25 , Bert Freudenberg wrote:

Ah, I see what you mean ... Apparently Read uses the PDF title which  
in this case is the filename of the original document. That is  
confusing, agreed.

> You might report the slowness as a ticket for the Read activity.

It really is prohibitively slow ...

- Bert -

On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 07:20:10PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> You might report the slowness as a ticket for the Read activity.
>
> It really is prohibitively slow ...

It is a generic problem with evince, which is the root of the
Read activity. This seems to be a pre-existing bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=183397

I don't know if it is an evince issue or a fedora issue.

I worked around it by reading the file in xpdf rather than
evince. This is not an option on an XO, however.

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

Matthew Fulmer wrote: Thank you guys for confirming this.
I'll send a mail to olpc-dev about it.

Karl

Matthew Fulmer schrieb: I'm using Ubuntu, and evince took a really long time to start up on that
document, too.
So I'd guess it's an evince problem.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin

On Mar 1, 2008, at 20:31 , Matthew Fulmer wrote:

I filed a bug against Read (#6623).

> I worked around it by reading the file in xpdf rather than
> evince. This is not an option on an XO, however.

Why? Xpdf works fine on the XO, I just tried.

But we really should stop continuing thus OT thread ;)

- Bert -

  Sorry, Germán, I missed this...

  Partly because whatever I do with Squeak, that is related to the
work, an honest answer is "not much".  But I've been attending most of
board member meetings and participating discussions especially stuff
that involves Viewpoints.

-- Yoshiki

No problem, and thanks by the response.

Cheers.


2008/3/2, Yoshiki Ohshima <[hidden email]>:

On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 21:31 +0100, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: My evince opened the document in ~ 1 sec. I'm using hardy alpha 5
(current) on a amd64 target.

Hope this info is useful.

Norbert