I am a longtime Smalltalk developer and a father myself, and I have followed with interest Squeak's evolution. Wether you liked Alan's occasional presentation or not, he and his group have been very active and successful in doing work with children, and if Disney paid the bills, all the better. I doubt that any of us could easily replicate years-long coordinated efforts involving children and pedagogues. And he's been doing it since the 70's at Xerox PARC. And unfortunately, after Alan's group left Disney, the educational Squeak activities (as a medium for children) have slowed down considerably.
On the other hand, while they were there (at Disney), they were very actively developing Squeak in the open, as a foundation for their work, while making clear that they also had to do some proprietary work for Disney on top of it, but that other stuff was never published. What's wrong with that? They actually managed to share most of their work while being paid for it. I thought this was an ideal situation, not something to be blamed for. I wonder how many of you are doing any better in this regard I think Alan's attitude has always been pragmatic (in the Linus sense), and while they did their best to share their work (and they were developing so fast that very few external people were able to contribute back anything, so it was unidirectional sharing), they were never free-software zealots. Just some of the best developers I have ever seen. Florin P.S. As for working for big corporations, heck, in this economy, I would even take a job with Enron, Tyco, the federal government, you name it. And even if they would not let me share my work > I can understand your "emotional reaction", and I might even share your > resentment against everything with "Disney" in its name. However, when > Alan Kay and his group went to work there, they made sure that the base > Squeak system would not become "infected" by Disney. You can read about > Alan's intent for the Squeak license at > http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/229 . I do not see any reason why > ypu should be concerned with this. This is Kay: Jan, 2004. With debian in his sights. I saw Kay, Nov 2000 (approx), as the resident Disney Visionary, being paid, used, whatever, to give Disney a claim of right to legitimacy in the serious educational software market. The right that would have no doubt been abused. And Kay would be from a different planet to imagine otherwise. And I saw him treat his audience to Goofy goofing about a squeak screen. Alan seems to make things up as he goes along. I would sincerely ask him to desist from inventing our future. Art
