[GemStone-Smalltalk] A true community license

[Paul Baumann via GemStone-Smalltalk]

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

On Dec 1, 2016 11:31 AM, "Charles Monteiro via GemStone-Smalltalk" <
gemstone-smalltalk at lists.gemtalksystems.com> 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.
>
> Note that it is not the model of any new modern databases i.e. the Mongo
> and Redis's of this new brave world.
>
> So how crazy expensive is a GBJ license anyhow ?
>
> 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.
>
> thanks
>
> --
> Charles
>
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