Musing out loud... [Why not Smalltalk?]

[James A. Robertson]

Reality is a point of view wrote:
> 
>  +---- clayberg at instantiations.com wrote (Tue, 17 Apr 2001 22:02:17 -0400):
>  | Then explain why Sun bought Anamorphic and their HotSpot technology for
>  | *several* tens of millions of dollars. If Sun already had all this in house,
>  +----
> 
> Patent.
> 
> Maybe staff?
> 
> Sun paid a lot more than 10M for that little Linux box company!
> 
> Why not Smalltalk?  Because the licensing sucks.

Hmm - not really.  Back at ParcPlace (later PPD) we licensed Smalltalk
(the right to implement and call it Smalltalk) for $1.00.  No ongoing
royalties.  No annual fees.  A flat dollar.  We gave up that right when
the X3J20 ANSI process got going.  

So try again.  Sun could have licensed Smalltalk for $1.00 and done
whatever they wanted with it.  

At this point, anyone can implement and call the result Smalltalk
without paying the successor company (Cincom) anything at all.  As
compared to (say) Java....


> 
> Why not Objective C?  Because stack cracking sucks.
> 
> Why not Python?  Um . . . because the : is superfluous?
> 
> --
> Gary Johnson     gjohnson at season.com
> Privacy on the net is still illegal.
> <a href=http://www.squeak.org>Tired of selfish technology monopolies?</a>

-- 
James A. Robertson
Product Manager (Smalltalk), Cincom
jarober at mail.com
<Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library>