KBM responds to my OSS rant from yesterday:

What else? Now here is a play that might be of particular interest to the Smalltalk ecosystem, especially if IBM ( a big name if not an active player recently) leaves it: Smalltalk companies co-operate on the parts of Smalltalk where there is no worthwhile competitive advantage. i.e. they use a common base and compete on new more interesting areas. Co-opetition. Painful whilst the common base is constructed, but it could save money for each company. This saved money can now be used to either allow survival if customers leave the arena, or allows investment in new areas to compete with Java, C# et al.

So the fact that companies pay people to work on Open source is neither some new revelation , nor a dirty secret. I see it as a sign of people trying new business models - and some are succeeding.

The problem with that is, all the Smalltalk vendors already have that base implemented. There's really no motivation to go that way as a result. There's also the fact that the various implementations vary quite a bit. As to "trying to business models" - well, I'll make the point again: show me one that works for Cincom Smalltalk and funds the level of development we do.