[squeak-dev] Funding (was: What Constitutes a Complete and Final Release?)
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[squeak-dev] Funding (was: What Constitutes a Complete and Final Release?)
 
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On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Hilaire Fernandes <[hidden email]> wrote: I think you're overstating things a bit. The point is that unless you are willing to jump in and help, or provide other means of help (i.e. funding), one shouldn't complain about the state of affairs. The people doing this work are doing it as a free service to others and for that, we should be grateful.tim Rowledge a écrit : At the same time, maybe we should be thinking about alternative means of funding. The way I see it, funding is a means of enabling more people to spend more of their time working on squeak (presumably something they enjoy). I think the bounty model doesn't work all that well, and I think being dependent on benevolent commercial ventures to develop and donate substantial code is also sub-optimal. With commercial ventures, their attention is always going to be focused on their product. Innovating and developing the core squeak system will consequently only get their attention when it is necessary to further the commercial product. And then, they will only develop it as far as it needs to go to serve their interests and no further. I find it a real shame that the economy around core platforms and tools seems to have evaporated with the open source movement. It seems that there is precious little funding available to those that want to develop new languages, new operating systems, new development tools and the like. There is a modest amount of innovation going on in spite of this reality, but progress is frustratingly slow.
Here's an idea for a funding model. Instead of always releasing new stuff immediately under MIT, how about releasing some stuff under a time limited proprietary license with a specific date at which it reverts to MIT (this would be baked into the original license such that the "freedom date" is irrevocable). The date could be 3 months, 6 months or even a year or two into the future. In the interim, anyone wishing to use that software would need to pay some fee to the author(s). This is the essentially the same idea that is behind copyright laws, but on a dramatically shorter timeframe that is more appropriate for software (the life of copy rights in the US extends for life+70 years I believe, which certainly doesn't work for software). If we could make something like this work successfully (and I'd say that success means that more people are able to spend more of their time working on squeak (instead of other endeavors to pay the bills)), I think people would quickly take notice. Imagine if this came to be an expectation of all software licenses. Imagine if all commercial software were sold like this.
To me, this is more in line with basic economics. The cost to produce software is substantial, but the marginal cost to distribute software is effectively zero. So, over time the price of software (or any intellectual property) must approach zero. It's unnatural for software to be locked up under proprietary licenses for what is effectively an indefinite period of time. It's also unnatural in my opinion to rely solely on indirect means of funding (relying on people deriving inherent fun in the work or commercial benevolence or services associated with the free software, etc). Musicians will deal with this by deriving money from live performances or associated merchandising and hence be able to offer recordings for free right from the start. I doubt too many people will pay to watch many of us as we write code, so we have to think of alternative means.
Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high quality 3.10, it would be enough to entice a few people into spending a larger chunk of their time working on that problem. The compromise we make is that for the first 6 months (or whatever the author decides), it's not free software...you must pay $10. The small size of the squeak community won't make people rich in so doing, but over time, a better squeak means a larger community and a larger community means that more people will have an opportunity to participate as a supplier in such an economy.
- Stephen |
Re: [squeak-dev] Funding (was: What Constitutes a Complete and Final Release?)
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> I think you're overstating things a bit. The point is that unless you are > willing to jump in and help, or provide other means of help (i.e. funding), > one shouldn't complain about the state of affairs. The people doing this > work are doing it as a free service to others and for that, we should be > grateful. I don't understand some logical articulations here. how does the fact that people generously offer a free service imply that the quality of this service can not be evaluated ? and how does the fact that someone does not participate in an effort imply that this person can not criticize the way this effort is accomplished ? could you elaborate ? regards, Stef |
Re: [squeak-dev] Funding (was: What Constitutes a Complete and Final Release?)
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On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
I didn't mean to imply that critique wasn't desirable. Critique is highly valuable. We should just be careful that such critique isn't misinterpreted as an expectation or demand that others address what we perceive to be shortcomings (and I'm not saying that that happened in this case).
- Stephen |
[squeak-dev] Re: Funding (was: What Constitutes a Complete and Final Release?)
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In reply to this post by Stephen Pair
Stephen Pair a écrit :
> I found this statement pretty irresponsible :( > And reading this statement one may think what is the Sqf good for > (beside the never ending registration in SFLC...) and outsiders may > even fell that Squeak community is not a good place to go (no clear > roadmap). > > Hilaire > > > I think you're overstating things a bit. The point is that unless you > are willing to jump in and help, or provide other means of help (i.e. > funding), one shouldn't complain about the state of affairs. The people Ok, so I am not this one as I was not writting about the state of affairs, but about a statement of a SqF board member regarding the state of affairs. Regarding funding, I was believing it was one target of the board, but Tim wrote something else, which after all I don't really understand what he exactly means by "Until and unless you provide funds to pay a team...." (sorry my English does not allow me to go behind subtleties). Hilaire |
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In reply to this post by Stephen Pair
>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Pair <[hidden email]> writes:
Stephen> Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high quality Stephen> 3.10, it would be enough to entice a few people into spending a Stephen> larger chunk of their time working on that problem. I'm pretty sure the cost to administer the collection of $10 and preventing anyone who hasn't ponied up from getting the bits will far exceed any total revenue. That's the reality. If you want money at that level, just put up a collection box, and encourage people to donate. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training! |
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Randal L. Schwartz ha scritto:
>>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Pair <[hidden email]> writes: > > Stephen> Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high quality > Stephen> 3.10, it would be enough to entice a few people into spending a > Stephen> larger chunk of their time working on that problem. > > I'm pretty sure the cost to administer the collection of $10 and preventing > anyone who hasn't ponied up from getting the bits will far exceed any total > revenue. That's the reality. If you want money at that level, just put up a > collection box, and encourage people to donate. Micropledge ( http://www.micropledge.org) is a good service to manage small-sized contributions. Giovanni |
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In reply to this post by Randal L. Schwartz
Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Pair <[hidden email]> writes: > > Stephen> Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high quality > Stephen> 3.10, it would be enough to entice a few people into spending a > Stephen> larger chunk of their time working on that problem. > > I'm pretty sure the cost to administer the collection of $10 and preventing > anyone who hasn't ponied up from getting the bits will far exceed any total > revenue. That's the reality. If you want money at that level, just put up a > collection box, and encourage people to donate. Indeed. I thought in the past about possible models for funding Squeak directly and one that made sense was the "Redhat model" by which I mean a subscription-based business model where people basically pay for support and a continuous integration of fixes and enhancements. Sort of like Squeak-central worked internally: Have an update stream or similar that paying customers get access to, possibly at different levels of support (fixes only; fixes+enhancements; fixes+enhancements+alpha stuff). Then make regular external releases that people can download. For a commercial entitity there is an obvious advantage to being able to continuously integrate incremental changes and having this go through an orderly QA and test cycle is another advantage. And of course, for larger companies it would mean there is a vendor to talk to. The obvious difficulty is there is zero information about the size of the market for such a business model; in particular considering that it would need to be able to compete with a free community offering. Cheers, - Andreas |
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On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Andreas Raab <[hidden email]> wrote:
I don't consider the RedHat model to be direct funding. It's indirect in the sense that they aren't charging for the actual software, but rather the service of consolidating, testing and managing the contributions of many. That is valuable, and obviously, that can work. My argument is that maybe copyright law actually has it right, but that it's just the timeframe in which things become open source (life+70) that's off the mark. So, let's imagine that one creates some cool new thing that's interesting to most of the community. If they make it available under a license that says "pay $10 (I'm making up a number here) and you can use this as you desire now, or wait 1 year and it will be available to you under MIT" what would be the reaction? I'd say that competes very well with free. Why would anyone go to the effort of creating something competitive if the code is good, if the fee is nominal and if the duration of the commercial license is a) established up front and irrevocable, and b) not onerously far into the future. Unless someone thinks they could come up with something better in the very near future, there is very little incentive to do so. And if they do, well that benefits everyone. The people that need it most would fund the development for everyone else.
In terms of figuring out the market, there were ~500 people that cared enough about squeak to vote on the board. If you take that as a guide, then maybe you guess that with a reasonably appealing offering you could capture 50% of that market at $10. That's $2500. It's not going to set anyone free of their corporate shackles, but it's not bad if the effort amounts to a few weekends of work and you enjoy what you're doing along the way. And, the more such things we have, the more appealing squeak becomes and the more the market grows.
I am merely frustrated that in my ~5 year absence from squeak, my perception is that squeak is worse off today than it was 5 years ago. I am encouraged in some respects, but in others, it's very discouraging (very, very discouraging). I am also very concerned that the entire open source movement seems to be moving in a direction where we'll all be employed by large corporations who grant us the right to contribute to open source "at their convenience." That is disturbing.
So anyway, we can debate it, or we can try it. There are a lot of things people have contributed over the years that I would have gladly paid for as long as I knew it would be MIT licensed in the near future and was good quality. Monticello, OmniBrowser, Traits, UI enhancements, and more recently hydraVM (just to name a very few...there are many others). I would like to see someone try this with their next contribution.
- Stephen |
Re: [squeak-dev] Re: Funding
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I believe the idea of exclusive content (whatever that may be) is not
a solution to funding. In fact I think it will even have the opposite effect of alienating many of the *178* who bothered enough to vote. Much better to foster a more *inclusive* community spirit and try to increase that number a 100 times. Then you may have the critical mass to offer value-added extras. Blender is a good example and despite past failures it now seems to be doing pretty well. Outside of the product itself, I put most of Blenders success down to the very vibrant BlenderArtists FORUM with "over 20,000 registered users". IMHO a modern style forum is essential these days as I suspect most of the younger generation are simply not inspired by mailing lists. There is a sense of "congregating" around a forum while a mailing-list appears as a somewhat intrusive cluttering of already busy mailboxes. It would also help if there was a more visible focus on new users and usability in general. On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 4:10 AM, Stephen Pair <[hidden email]> wrote: > > > On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Andreas Raab <[hidden email]> wrote: > > > > Randal L. Schwartz wrote: > > > > > "Stephen" == Stephen Pair <[hidden email]> writes: > > > > > > Stephen> Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high > quality > > > Stephen> 3.10, it would be enough to entice a few people into spending a > > > Stephen> larger chunk of their time working on that problem. > > > > > > I'm pretty sure the cost to administer the collection of $10 and > preventing > > > anyone who hasn't ponied up from getting the bits will far exceed any > total > > > revenue. That's the reality. If you want money at that level, just put > up a > > > collection box, and encourage people to donate. > > > > > > > Indeed. I thought in the past about possible models for funding Squeak > directly and one that made sense was the "Redhat model" by which I mean a > subscription-based business model where people basically pay for support and > a continuous integration of fixes and enhancements. Sort of like > Squeak-central worked internally: Have an update stream or similar that > paying customers get access to, possibly at different levels of support > (fixes only; fixes+enhancements; fixes+enhancements+alpha stuff). Then make > regular external releases that people can download. For a commercial > entitity there is an obvious advantage to being able to continuously > integrate incremental changes and having this go through an orderly QA and > test cycle is another advantage. And of course, for larger companies it > would mean there is a vendor to talk to. The obvious difficulty is there is > zero information about the size of the market for such a business model; in > particular considering that it would need to be able to compete with a free > community offering. > > > I don't consider the RedHat model to be direct funding. It's indirect in > the sense that they aren't charging for the actual software, but rather the > service of consolidating, testing and managing the contributions of many. > That is valuable, and obviously, that can work. My argument is that maybe > copyright law actually has it right, but that it's just the timeframe in > which things become open source (life+70) that's off the mark. So, let's > imagine that one creates some cool new thing that's interesting to most of > the community. If they make it available under a license that says "pay $10 > (I'm making up a number here) and you can use this as you desire now, or > wait 1 year and it will be available to you under MIT" what would be the > reaction? I'd say that competes very well with free. Why would anyone go > to the effort of creating something competitive if the code is good, if the > fee is nominal and if the duration of the commercial license is a) > established up front and irrevocable, and b) not onerously far into the > future. Unless someone thinks they could come up with something better in > the very near future, there is very little incentive to do so. And if they > do, well that benefits everyone. The people that need it most would fund > the development for everyone else. > > In terms of figuring out the market, there were ~500 people that cared > enough about squeak to vote on the board. If you take that as a guide, then > maybe you guess that with a reasonably appealing offering you could capture > 50% of that market at $10. That's $2500. It's not going to set anyone free > of their corporate shackles, but it's not bad if the effort amounts to a few > weekends of work and you enjoy what you're doing along the way. And, the > more such things we have, the more appealing squeak becomes and the more the > market grows. > > I am merely frustrated that in my ~5 year absence from squeak, my perception > is that squeak is worse off today than it was 5 years ago. I am encouraged > in some respects, but in others, it's very discouraging (very, very > discouraging). I am also very concerned that the entire open source > movement seems to be moving in a direction where we'll all be employed by > large corporations who grant us the right to contribute to open source "at > their convenience." That is disturbing. > > So anyway, we can debate it, or we can try it. There are a lot of things > people have contributed over the years that I would have gladly paid for as > long as I knew it would be MIT licensed in the near future and was good > quality. Monticello, OmniBrowser, Traits, UI enhancements, and more > recently hydraVM (just to name a very few...there are many others). I would > like to see someone try this with their next contribution. > > - Stephen > > > |
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On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:23 AM, Derek O'Connell <[hidden email]> wrote:
I believe the idea of exclusive content (whatever that may be) is not Squeak has been around more than 10 years now. It's not evident to me that the community is significantly larger today than it was just a couple years after its debut. As for alienating, I don't see anything exclusive or alienating about this approach.
Then you may have the critical mass Blender happened under almost the exact same circumstances that I propose, only by accident (and on a much longer timeframe than I would envision).
Outside of the This is a different topic...but, yes, I'm with you on it...anything that could enhance the community experience would be a good thing.
- Stephen |
Re: [squeak-dev] Re: Funding
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On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Stephen Pair <[hidden email]> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:23 AM, Derek O'Connell <[hidden email]> wrote: > > I believe the idea of exclusive content (whatever that may be) is not > > a solution to funding. In fact I think it will even have the opposite > > effect of alienating many of the *178* who bothered enough to vote. > > Much better to foster a more *inclusive* community spirit and try to > > increase that number a 100 times. > > Squeak has been around more than 10 years now. It's not evident to me that > the community is significantly larger today than it was just a couple years > after its debut. Are you saying that is good/bad/not-a-problem? > As for alienating, I don't see anything exclusive or > alienating about this approach. I don't disagree with your proposal in principle but I think willingness to contribute (if at all needed) may only come after the fee paying period. OTOH if that period is kept short enough then maybe people will play along with the idea. > > Then you may have the critical mass > > to offer value-added extras. Blender is a good example and despite > > past failures it now seems to be doing pretty well. > > Blender happened under almost the exact same circumstances that I propose, > only by accident (and on a much longer timeframe than I would envision). Do mean originally or lately? Or do you refer to the period of "Blender Publisher"? If you mean the latter then IIRC it failed and there was a period of uncertainty about Blender's future until the "Foundation" idea arose. Blender already had a good following by then but IMHO this was a catalyst for fostering community spirit and probably provided a momentum that still benefits Blender and it's users today. I only use Blender occasionally these days but I did buy Publisher and I bought every edition of the manual and will continue to do so. Why? Hmmm, because Ton and his crew are responsive, open, helpful, have vision, purpose and, damn it, I just *want* them to succeed :-) Get 20000 "users" and money will flow if only a fraction of them have that attitude. In fairness you may now wonder if I have that attitude to Squeak. Sort-a, maybe-ish. Even though I can see potential and firmly believe that Squeak should be on everyone's "must-learn-to-use" list, I am not surprised it isn't. The user friendly façade is skin-deep, getting information is sometimes akin to pulling one's own teeth, what should be simple tasks often end up feeling like quicksand, "documentation" is seemingly a dirty word (SBE, a sterling effort, came long after my first experiences), there's too much "pay me if you want it" demand type attitude, a refusal in some respects to move with the times and especially no/little recognition that some people just want to "use" it, not get intimate with it's darkest depth's almost every time you set out to do something (that's sort of the same as the "quicksand" comment I know, but sort-of different ;-) ). I have commented in the past to the effect that some sort of buffer is needed for new/occasional users and I also think the user experience has to rock-solid. OTOH where Squeak leads others follow and it's community has some of the brightest, ingenious, helpful and dedicated people I have come across... but it is clearly not enough. My stance is more users = more activity = more visibility = more willingness to adopt = more chance of general funding (rather than just for occasional specific tasks). Then again recent comments on the ML claiming new users not required/ community is large enough, etc, make me despondent and dents my enthusiasm. > > Outside of the > > product itself, I put most of Blenders success down to the very > > vibrant BlenderArtists FORUM with "over 20,000 registered users". IMHO > > a modern style forum is essential these days as I suspect most of the > > younger generation are simply not inspired by mailing lists. There is > > a sense of "congregating" around a forum while a mailing-list appears > > as a somewhat intrusive cluttering of already busy mailboxes. It would > > also help if there was a more visible focus on new users and usability > > in general. > > This is a different topic...but, yes, I'm with you on it...anything that > could enhance the community experience would be a good thing. > > - Stephen Different, I agree, but all interrelated. This is one of those few occasions when I would tip my beany-cap at marketing people and saying "branding" and "delivery on brand promises" is all-important. BTW, welcome back after your five year absence! Care to explain why you left/ what brought you back? May be some lessons there :-) |
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On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Derek O'Connell <[hidden email]> wrote:
I think it's bad for exactly the reasons you articulate below. It's not some vain desire to be popular. It's about engaging more people, creating a viable economy (by a variety of means) and in the end, spur more rapid progress.
You may be right. I personally am very reluctant to invest effort in something that is not open source. However, something that I knew would become open source on a relatively short time horizon would be a different matter.
...snipped stuff about Blender... With Blender, my only point was that it started life as a commercial product...dabbled with some hybrid approaches along the way, and then ultimately became open source. Now that there is a substantial community around it, there are lots of options available to that community to sustain an economy. The question is, would it have evolved if it tried to start out life as open source? Or, would it have gained 5 followers and fizzled out long before anything materialized? It's also interesting to note that Smalltalk (and hence squeak) began life as a proprietary system (corporate research at first, then later commercialized, and even later open sourced). Would Smalltalk have happened without the economy around corporate research? Would we even be having this discussion if that had not happened? Has there been substantial progress since squeak was open sourced? Are there not a substantial number of people on this list that are frustrated by the slow progress? Or frustrated with their own incapacity to do anything about it (or to do as much as they would like)? I would love nothing more than to be in a position where I could focus 100% of my professional attention at squeak and the community around it. OTOH where Squeak leads others follow and it's community has some of Yes, I agree. More brains, more vitality, more progress and more fun. BTW, welcome back after your five year absence! Care to explain why Well, it comes down to a scarcity of time. I had kids and I have a job and there is very little time left over. I had also failed to make swiki.net (hosted wikis) into a viable business, which, being based on squeak, would have enabled me to continue using squeak as part of my work. As for what's brought me back, I'd say it's a desire to find inspiration combined with the fact that the demands on my time are somewhat less severe (though still very constricting). I'd say the lesson is this: let's figure out a way to make working on squeak and putting food on the table less mutually exclusive. - Stephen
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The difference between Blender and Squeak if we look at them as
products that Blender is _end-user_ product, while Squeak is platform without any end-user products. While Blender requires a lot to learn for some of newcomers, it's targeted on specific tasks: 3D design/rendering and postprocessing. And Squeak by itself is nothing more than a base platform for developing applications (like Blender). A squeak VM/image plays same role as operating system for Blender: you have to install some applications for working on specific tasks. So, it's really different. Nobody willing to donate/fund operating systems. People may want to fund specific projects, which developed to deal with specific tasks in specific areas (web/3D design etc), but not operating systems, which is too generic and basic and not targeted to be used by end-users. -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig. |
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In reply to this post by Stephen Pair
Smalltalk is only a niche. And Squeak is a niche in the world of
Smalltalk. Furthermore, a great part of the Squeak community is academic. I don't see a good chance of fund raising a noteworthy amount until the Squeak community grows a lot and especially more companies get interested in Squeak. I really doubt that we can find many who like to throw money at Squeak without being convinced to get something valuable back. But it is hard to get new people interested in Smalltalk and Squeak. And many of the newcomers get alienated by many aspects of Squeak: - it is hard to find documentation - it is hard to get used to Morphic (its power isn't obvious but its clutter is) - it is hard to find a Squeak version with not so many obvious bugs and problems Andreas |
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In reply to this post by Igor Stasenko
The way ahead for 3.10....
3.10 is out and has been announced as released. I myself was disappointed that the final 3.10 did not contain a couple of fixes that I regarded as essential. Having come to terms with the fact that I was never going to get the 3.10 team to see my point of view, I started LPF. I myself aim to use 3.10 + LPF + Clean + Latest, as the basis for the production images that I am using. At present I am using 3.10 + LPF + LatestUnstable. So I think that the way ahead for 3.10 is for the community to join in contributing to LPF scripts designed to be run in a fresh 3.10 image so that the combination of "3.10 + LPF + Tidy + Clean + Latest + Welcome" will produce what we are looking for, and that can be released later as 3.11 or 3.10.1 best regards Keith |
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In reply to this post by Igor Stasenko
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Igor Stasenko <[hidden email]> wrote:
The difference between Blender and Squeak if we look at them as Yes, nobody other than Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Sun and a handful of others. ;) - Stephen |
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In reply to this post by Andreas Wacknitz
A key problem with funding is the sheer amount one would need to
achieve very much; if we postulate a dozen people (say 10 that do development work, a manager/leader and an admin) you would have to budget around $1.2M a year; increasing steadily as the USD sinks into the mire. Volunteer work can achieve amazing things in some cases but it rarely has much success in handling the 'boring bits'. Look how few people have offered at any time to work on the unglamorous building of releases, harvesting of bug reports and potential fixes, writing of comments, etc etc etc. Come to that, look how few people do any of that even when paid to.... So far as I can see the only way that major work has been done in/for Squeak is when someone is funding a sizeable project and it includes a subsystem that can be spun out for general use. Interval, Apple, Disney, exobox, HP, IBM, and of course the slightly different sort of funding from some academic cases. Oh and a few of us (Anthony, Bryce, Craig, me, maybe others?) that have de-facto funded projects simply by not earning any money for an extended period whilst we do something for Squeak. Three years of my near-full-time attention adds up to a pretty big donation. I think - as with so many things - Alan was right about funding. He successfully managed to get three major corporations to provide loosely tied funding and now has a sizeable chunk from the NSF. We do need to remember though that his aim is to develop a sensible education system, not a 'better Squeak'. Bottom line - unless you can find major funding the only resources available are those freely offered by *you*. tim -- tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim When flying inverted, remember that down is up and up is expensive |
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On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:31 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
A key problem with funding is the sheer amount one would need to achieve very much; if we postulate a dozen people (say 10 that do development work, a manager/leader and an admin) you would have to budget around $1.2M a year; increasing steadily as the USD sinks into the mire. Are planning a mission to the moon? There are many things that could be accomplished with a lot less. Volunteer work can achieve amazing things in some cases but it rarely has much success in handling the 'boring bits'. Look how few people have offered at any time to work on the unglamorous building of releases, harvesting of bug reports and potential fixes, writing of comments, etc etc etc. Come to that, look how few people do any of that even when paid to.... More like enormous...funding can take many forms and be accomplished in many ways. I think - as with so many things - Alan was right about funding. He successfully managed to get three major corporations to provide loosely tied funding and now has a sizeable chunk from the NSF. We do need to remember though that his aim is to develop a sensible education system, not a 'better Squeak'. To date, that has certainly been the most successful approach to funding squeak. Bottom line - unless you can find major funding the only resources available are those freely offered by *you*. Which of course equates to major funding.
- Stephen |
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In reply to this post by Igor Stasenko
I think that founding should first and foremost come from the people
earning money from the Squeak. Companies making money from Squeak based products, consultants consulting Squeak based solutions and so on. I'm actually preparing to donate back to community when I'll move my first customer's system on Squeak. I feel a kind of obligation to give something back, and if I make money I should give back money. This is right way to do, that's what I'm sure. Janko Igor Stasenko wrote: > The difference between Blender and Squeak if we look at them as > products that Blender is _end-user_ product, while Squeak is platform > without any end-user products. > While Blender requires a lot to learn for some of newcomers, it's > targeted on specific tasks: 3D design/rendering and postprocessing. > And Squeak by itself is nothing more than a base platform for > developing applications (like Blender). > A squeak VM/image plays same role as operating system for Blender: you > have to install some applications for working on specific tasks. > > So, it's really different. Nobody willing to donate/fund operating > systems. People may want to fund specific projects, which developed to > deal with specific tasks in specific areas (web/3D design etc), but > not operating systems, which is too generic and basic and not targeted > to be used by end-users. > > -- Janko Mivšek AIDA/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si |
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Hello Janko,
JM> I'm actually preparing to donate back to community when I'll move my JM> first customer's system on Squeak. I feel a kind of obligation to give same with me, I've done some commercial work in Squeak mainly on the basis that it was my unpaid fun. As soon as it's recognized as a contribution worth money I plan to donate a part of this for Squeak. Until then I mainly can donate replies to newbies :-)) Cheers, Herbert |
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