[ this is my personal opinion. I may be wrong, but I do not think so ]
I do not see a compelling reason why Pharo should be supported in such a way by ESUG and not GST, Squeak, Cuis, or any other open source Smalltalk implementation.
There is no reason. Pharo will get a sponsor because people behind Pharo asked for it, in the same way that people behind GST asked.
The money could certainly be used by the other projects for activities like going to and presenting at the ESUG conferences which is often not done for lack of funding. If ESUG wants to sponsor open source Smalltalk dialects by handing out money directly, it should do so fairly and transparently and not favor a single fork of a single dialect.
I am pretty sure that if the Squeak community, or any other community set up a nice and reasonable proposal, the esug board will consider it. This discussion reminds me a large project that got founded recently in Chile. Everybody said they are interested in participating (and receiving money), but only a very few actually made up a clear, concise and promising proposal. Not that they were not included in the discussion and the regular meetings. The persons who did not receive the money "were too busy to write the proposal". Well... at the end they complained saying that it is not fair. Cheers, Alexandre -- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.