I must say I am a bit surprised how emotional this discussion gets. Nobody is doubting that the amount and quality of work and passion you and others put into Smalltalk as a community on one side and Pharo on the other are really worth a lot. And of course the success of Pharo is a succes for Smalltalk. We as a Community profit so much from the small and big things hapenning.

But this whole discussion is about another topic. It is about whether people would like ESUG to spend between 2000 and 4000 Euros per year in support of the Pharo consortium. I think we even haven't heard enough opinions yet to judge what the community thinks. I guess you were prepared for negative responses, so what makes you upset is hopefully not the fact per se, but the rhetorics.

I think ESUG should support the Pharo project. But ESUG should not seem to be an entity that somewhat guarantees a steady cash flow for Pharo. Let's put it another way: if an ESUG member/sponsor wants to support Pharo in particular, they can always go for a membership or sponsorship in the Pharo Consortium.

So sponsorship is fine with me, and a cheaper membership level is also fine, even when combined with additional sponsorship (e.g. when the ESUG conference is a financial success and there's more money on the bank than needed), but I fear that a corparate membership level would bring up the question of CoI over and over again, for as long as there are people active in both entities. Which, by itself, is neither bad nor a problem from my standpoint. Thinking of ESUG as "neutral" or "independent" is an illusion, because it will always be run and sponsored by enthusiasts - and an enthusiast cannot be neutral ;-)

P.S.: So what did I do for the Smalltalk Community? My company sponsors ESUG for a few years now, and I try to help promote Smalltalk by blogging and trying to motivate VA Smalltalk users (because these are the kind of Smalltalkers I am in touch with most of the time during my day job) to participate in the community. I try to transport the enthusiasm, knowledge and code from the community into legacy Smalltalk projects (again, mostly VAST). You could say I try to build a sub-community in the VAST world that somehow feels quite offline for many reasons. My company has spent quite some time and money on organizing events in which VAST users can find out they are not the last ones on earth. Together with Marten and Sebastian I do the Smalltalk Inspect Podcast, in which we try to cover all Smalltalk dialects and all kinds of topics. I know this still is far less time and passion than what you or Marcus or other Board members put into the Smalltalk community, but I hope this shows that my intention here is to help build and sustain the community, not to troll about the ESUG board.

"Stéphane Ducasse" <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> hat am 5. Juli 2012 um 09:30 geschrieben:

> BTW since everybody wants to give lessons here is our internal process. A board member never votes when he has a
> conflict of interest. For example when a student applies for an article sponsoring (even 150 Euros), if a board member is in the group of the student
> or may have any conflict of interest, the board member does not take part of the discussion or the voting process.
> This is always like that.
>
> Now as a good exercise for our little community, it would be good that everybody check what he did recently not for its own little
> assets (my little program my precious my little business my precious) but for somebody else asset.
> I wrote and edited the seaside book and I should have better wrote something on ruby on rails
> because we earned a ridiculous amount of money and it was 4 years of work (but this does not count) and I pushed so that we get
> all dialects represented, while I could have simply focus on Pharo.
> Similarly, we sponsored conferences like FAST and Smalltalk Solutions, summerTalk projects, user groups and we are systematically promoting Smalltalk.
>
> Now I'm a bit worried about some reactions especially the rhetorical part of them. It seems to me
> that in our community we do not like success - probably because this is better to be the king of a small castle than
> a knight in a kingdom. Personally I would prefer to be able to build graphical system like D3 in Javascript with my Smalltalk but I cannot. So may be Javascript is
> the future of any smart smalltalker.
>
> Personally I want the success of Smalltalk and I built the tools to make it happen. Pharo is one of such tool. We built pharo because the tools in presence
> were not there to push the way we wanted. Just for your information, we are making pharo not for US but for people to be able to
> make money with it. Now if somebody would come, fork pharo and make our dream reality by being better than pharo we would
> be more than happy. Why because doing pharo is a pain. People complain, doing is slow, we have other agendas.
>
> I'm talking with lawyers INRIA since two years for the consortium. INRIA put 180 Keuros for pharo on the table and we are negotiating to get another 60 K.
> Our little team will also put 30 Keuros plus a massive amount of our free hours. Of course smart people can think that this is because this is for us. No it is not,
> we are building pharo for the community. In fact I would like to build other systems than pharo but so far the state of the system
> implementations does not let us experiment (proprietary or old systems), so we are basically forced to build pharo if we want to invent our future.
> May be some people do not want to have a future. But we do. Now you can not trust us or be against it this is your rights.
>
> So it would be a problem that ESUG the organization promoting Smalltalk has a problem
> to pay 2000/4000 Euros, when I see what our group is putting or INRIA.
> Seriously, if this is the case we should really be clear about that and rethink what is ESUG and also probably do something else of our free time.
>
> Stef
>
>
> On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:49 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>
> > Il 05/07/2012 08:47, Stéphane Ducasse ha scritto:
> >> Reading this thread after all we did for Smalltalk is quite taught.
> >> The wolfs are back apparently. Sad period. I think the esug board
> >> will have to really decide if ESUG is worth after all. Now may be
> >> ESUG popularity is a problem for certain people or this is the pharo
> >> popularity. May be this is good to not give a chance to a promising
> >> open source project (especially when we see that such question never
> >> arose when it was about other Smalltalks). Life is so funny
> >> sometimes.
> >
> > No Stephane, it's not that. Part of it is just misinformation and I
> > think that was clarified; the other part is just basic handling of
> > conflict of interest, and I think it's in ESUG's interest to keep its
> > usual level of transparency.
> >
> > Paolo
> >
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