LSWVST Publishing plans for 2008

the following recent events make us rethink the plans for publishing LSWVST in 2008:

Dolphin Smalltalk will be not developed further ( Announcement from August 10, 2007 ) . DST is an excellent Windows Smalltalk. Its failure to create an income for a small firm in a market niche shows that it is not a good idea to publish a new Smalltalk tailored for a mass-market.

To enable customers to get access to our inhouse Smalltalk technology as originally planned we are requesting your comments and basically make an statement on the points below.

•  We are interested in LSWVST if we can get a 1-10 developer license for USD 25 T .together with a yearly update subscription of USD 2500.
•  We are interested only in LSWVST-VM and a VSE migration package  for 40 T USD together with a yearly update subscription of USD 2000. The VSE migration package contains infrastructure to enable multithreading, multithreaded debugging support, Unicode, binary compilation & further technology enhancements ( e.g. 40Bit Floats ) - but no new GUI Framework or development environment.
•  We are interested to purchase a Campus license for LSWVST for our University for USD 50 T
•  I am a single-developer, manufacturing Opensource or free software and I am interested if I can buy a single LSWVST license for USD 2000  together with a yearly update subscription of USD 500.
•  We are interested in a 2-day workshop for USD 3000 excluding travel expenses to research the migration to LSWVST.
•  We agree that our names & E-mail addresses are published together with our comments on the LSW website until LSW make the final publishing decision.

LSWVST will be initially delivered as 32 Bit Windows Version. Further versions like Windows X86 CE, ARM Version Linux versions and 64 Bit versions will be delivered with the update subscription. A License of LSWVST allows only the binary ( Bytecode and Source-code stripped ) form of delivering applications. A LSWVST license requires to sign a NDA.

If we can initially get aproximately 20 new business customers we will publish LWSVST in 2008. We will decide whether to publish or not in the beginning of 2008.

What are the alternatives ? To abandon the idea of publishing Smalltalk and start supporting Ruby,

So what would be the advantage of running ruby on top the LSWVST-VM:

Getting a fast compiled multithreaded Ruby.

We plan to start with LSW-Ruby-VM in December 2007 and hope to finish it within 3 months.

•  Writing a Ruby-Bytecode compiler in Smalltalk
•  Adding primitives for 0-Indexed Objects to the VM
•  Creating a base development environment

We request your comments for our plans to create a new commercial virtual-machine implementation for Ruby.