Please distribute this message around Dear Pharoers We are pursuing an effort to bring Pharo to the next level: we will set up a consortium of pharo users and industrial partners. Our goal is to build a legal infrastructure that will be able to sustain the development of Pharo and improve its future. As an example, we would like to be able to collect funds (ways as to be determined - we foresee a membership model or moral license) to pay engineering tasks to be performed such as improving the virtual machine, network libraries, better JIT support. To make it short we would like to give a chance to our community to grow and structure itself so that Pharo can get stronger and that risk (truck factor) gets minimized. We are contacting you to know if your company/research group would be interested to support such effort. Showing such interest is strategically important for us and INRIA which could also support such effort. Attached is the letter of support that we will collect once signed and scanned ( stephane.ducasse@inria.fr / faxed at: 00 33 (0)3 59 57 78 50) Thanks for your support The Pharo Board M. Denker, S. Ducasse, and A. Lienhard