I hardly see how supporting Pharo can be seen as unfair. Improving Pharo will help the whole Smalltalk community. It looks like clear to me.
Here is how it is unfair: If I understand the basic process of selecting and supporting projects by ESUG, then the distribution of projects supported by ESUG is roughly equivalent to the popularity of the various communities. This seems entirely fair and reasonable to me, and ESUG is doing a good job with the various projects it supports.
However, once ESUG starts giving chunks of money to particular dialects directly, then first of all that money is no longer spent across the various dialects. So for an approx. 3000 EUR Pharo membership the board could sponsor 20 students with 150 EUR each. And while it may be that 15 of those are indeed Pharo related, there is still sponsorshop done for the remaining 5 which would fall under the table if the money went directly to Pharo. That's seems obviously unfair.
what argument! you could find better. We sponsored students from HPI do attend the talks of eliot, we payed eliot trips and we did not asked them if they were using Squeak or Pharo.
Secondly, the membership in Pharo is perpetual; if some other project raises in popularity there will *still* 100% of the money be going to Pharo. For eternity. That's just as unfair.
ESUG can decide to stop anytime. So your augment is just for the sake of argumenting. Well done. But not recevable.
There is nothing wrong with sponsoring Pharo projects by ESUG. What's wrong is giving the money, which would otherwise be spent in some relation to the popularity of each dialect, to one dialect only.
Fun you never complained when Squeake.v. promoting etoy was sponsored, nor when most of the summer talk projects were done in Squeak. You did not complained when ESUG payed John mcIntosh to clean the mac squeak vm. Of course it was helping pharo too. For ESUG it was pushing the Smalltalk community. Stef