7/15/2013 — Meeting Minutes

Squeak board minutes 15 July 2013

present: Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Frank Shearar, Tim Rowledge

The annual summertime quiet-period has struck again.

4.5 is planned for release Q4/2013.  This is a rich release with the Environments feature and significant package factorings.

Colin is in process of moving to another hemisphere, so he may not be able to respond immediately to questions about Environments.

Meanwhile, Frank continues modularisation of the image.

Eliot is back from vacation and just released new Cog VM’s.

Eliot and Craig had met at one point to discuss integration of Spoon VM changes into Cog.  Additional work is needed.

6/3/2013 — Meeting Minutes

Squeak board minutes 3 June 2013

present: Bert Freudenberg, Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge

– We had a discussion about the Swiki.  We would like to have a rich and useful wiki for the community, but there is no way around having to do some work to achieve that.  Thankfully there appear to be some easy opportunities for cleaning.  A plan was discussed:

   1) get access to the swiki image so the code and features can be improved.

   2) is the Swiki software installable and testable on 4.5?

   3) some easy cleanups seem obvious:  remove empty & clearly obsolete pages.

   4) develop guidelines about what content is needed.

   5) ask other folks to help review and clean per guidelines.

– There was a discussion about the vision and future of Squeak.  Squeak evolves naturally by the participation of community members pushing their desired features into the image.  To the extent they are acceptable to the rest of the community ensures a sufficient element of stability that allows the community to remain up-to-date and cohesive.  Meanwhile the platform continually becomes a better and better Squeak.

– Some improvements come from individuals and some are purposefully discussed and acted on as a community.  Members of the board have some ideas about this and also invite others to open discussions about this on the mailing list.  As an example, there was a recent discussion about graphical backends to support anti-aliased output.

minutes 2013-03-04

Squeak board minutes 4 March 2013

present: all (Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge, Frank Shearar)

closed items:

+ Eliot and Colin met up in person last week, discussed technical stuff: building from core image, environments, file system, atomic reshape/reorg, fast reshape, parcel format, “quasi-quotes”. We discussed the quasi-quotes proposal, agreed that it’s worth trying out (e.g., for making HTML-generation code more readable). Eliot will continue to seek feedback from others with similar projects, e.g., Helvetia.

+ Chris Cunnington has agreed to take over as webteam leader.

+ Scheduled future open community meetings, on the no-board-meeting Mondays. Lots of things we could do together with that time, like occasional tutorials (e.g., quasi-quotes, Spoon). Craig tried out the Hangouts On Air feature of YouTube. It records Google Hangout sessions and makes them available quickly on YouTube. It seems to work, and could be useful for recording the community meetings. Interested folks could edit the sessions into something more concise for a mass audience. The next community meeting event is posted on a public Google Calendar, available via HTML and iCal. 

+ Now that we all have Immersive Terf accounts, we’ll try that for the next board meeting. This is an OpenQwaq instance hosted by 3DICC.

open items:

– discussion of Spoon by Frank and Craig

– updates to the Teams and Board pages on the Squeak website.

– voter list publication (Bert, Ron)

– Squeak badges and GSOC funds

– new SqueakSource server

– GSOC 2013 initiatives

Meeting Report for March 1, 2011

Bert, Craig, Jecel and Randal were present at this week’s Squeak board meeting.

Brad from the SFC reported that the funds ESUG had been generously holding for the Squeak project have now been transferred to the SFC account. Craig has done the same with the amount he had been holding. This puts Squeak in a far better position to spend on servers and other needed resources.

Since Squeak has found a legal home as a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, it can now receive your donations, too. Paypal and Google donation buttons will be added soon to the squeak.org site.

The Squeak Oversight Board election process is a little late this year. There was some discussion about how to move it forward. Last year we discussed to have a membership model for Squeak. Only registered members would be able to vote in that case, which might be more representative of the current Squeak user base than the informal email list we have been keeping so far. If you are interested in helping organize the elections, please join the elections team mailing list.

Merik Voswinkel and Lawson English proposed to host a mirror for SqueakSource (and, in the future, for other Squeak-related sites). This proposal was well received, having backups is important. SqueakSource is generously hosted by the University of Bern.

The Pharo Board sent an email to the squeak-dev list today, announcing plans to build a legal infrastructure. The Squeak Oversight Board supports the Pharo initiative to create a “User and Industrial Partners Consortium”. We share the goal of continuous improvement in the common base of all Squeak-derived systems.

Meeting Report for January 18th, 2011

Bert, Chris, Craig, Jecel, Juan and Randal were present at this week’s Squeak board meeting.

Jecel was experiencing network-bandwidth issues for part of the meeting, and so Skype-chat was suggested as a backup alternative for future board meetings.

4.2 is still scheduled for release sometime during the week of January 31st, 2011. Then, the trunk will be reopened for new features again.

It will soon be time for the annual Squeak board election. Bert suggested we manually create a definitive list of the registered voters for the 2011 election. Randal is taking that up.

The SqueakMap server package in the source repository is not the code currently being run by the production SqueakMap server. Chris is fixing that issue.

Meeting Report for 7/21/2010

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s summer! People are on vacation and consequently Craig (on vacation in Europe) wasn’t present in our meeting and Bert joined us from his hotel room and shared a view of the beach with us.

There wasn’t too much to talk about. We discussed a bit the SFC status and noted that we need to make some progress with the reconciliation of our finances. We’re still waiting for some info from the SFC on how to best address this issue and will ping them again as a reminder. Andreas brought up the issue of providing a Squeak image with Seaside preloaded and the board agrees that we should provide such an image on http://ftp.squeak.org/various_images/seaside.

We raised a couple of other issues in the discussion, including what a useful scope for 4.2 might be, how to make progress with community supported packages, and how to continue the discussion about documentation, but no specific action items resulted from these.

As a result we finished our meeting early. But hey, it’s summer!

Squeak joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

The Squeak Oversight Board is excited to announce that Squeak is now a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization composed of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. As a fiscal sponsor for FOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions.

By joining the Conservancy, Squeak obtains the benefits of a formal legal structure while keeping focused on software development. The benefits of joining the Conservancy include, most notably, the ability to collect donations and protection from personal liability for the developers of the project. Another benefit of joining the Conservancy is we can use it to hold assets, which are managed by the Conservancy on behalf of and at the direction of the Squeak Oversight Board. The Conservancy is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so member projects can receive tax-deductible donations to the extent allowed by law.

Squeak 4.1 released

Squeak 4.1 has just been released. From the release announcement:

Squeak 4.1 combines the license change occurring in the 4.0 release with the development work that has been going on while the relicensing process took place.

Much of the work in this release has been focused on fundamental improvements. Major achievements are the integration of Cog’s closure implementation, the improved UI look and feel, the new anti-aliased fonts, the core library improvements, and the modularity advances.

To download the Squeak 4.1 release please visit:

http://ftp.squeak.org/4.1

The Website will be updated over the next few days to reflect the availability of Squeak 4.1.

Squeak 4.0 released

The Squeak project announced today the public release of Squeak 4.0. This release completes the multi-year effort to relicense Squeak under FOSS licenses.

Squeak 4.0 is functionally equivalent to the previous Squeak 3.10.2 release but licensed under the MIT license with some original parts remaining under the Apache license.

Current development work will be released as 4.1 as soon as possible following the release of 4.0.

Intent to Change License for Squeak 4.0

The Squeak Oversight Board plans to finalize the multi-year effort of re-licensing Squeak. Squeak 4.0 is scheduled to be released on Monday, March 15th, 2010 and will be licensed under the MIT License with some original parts remaining under the Apache License. This release will be functionally equivalent to the previous 3.10.2 release. Current development work will be released as 4.1 as soon as possible following the release of 4.0.

This notice is intended as a “last call” before the actual license change takes effect. We have assembled re-licensing agreements from every identifiable contributor. However, if you have contributed to Squeak or know of someone who has contributed and has not been contacted about the re-licensing effort, this notice is intended to make you aware of the upcoming change and to allow you to contact the Squeak Oversight Board regarding your contributions before the license change takes place.

Please distribute this notice widely. Questions or comments should be sent to relicensing@squeak.org.