Sean Malloy passes on some news about Dolphin's plans for the product:

Andy Bower mentioned a while back, that Object Arts were toying with the idea of releasing a free version of Dolphin at the same time they released the full version of 6.0.

While they still haven't decided just what version of Dolphin they will be releasing into the wild, but they have now definitely decided that a version of Dolphin Smalltalk, will be available for free under the name of Dolphin Community Edition.

This is pretty exciting news for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Dolphin Smalltalk is the best pure Windows Smalltalk. If you are interested in developing applications on Windows, then it is without a doubt the version to use. Secondly, with a free version of Dolphin, it sets the entry level to a point where people who may not have checked it out before will definitely look into it now.

This is not official news yet. I knew about it for a while, Andy linked to the new Object Arts site in the beta test newsgroup, and it was mentioned on the new site. I asked if I could write something about it, and he didn't say no. So while I don't think that they are going to change their mind about a free version now, they may change their mind about what exactly a free version contains.

Interesting news, and it should help spread the use of Smalltalk.