Greg Bonadies - "transition manager" - just reiterated the schedule - EOL for VAST (from IBM's side) in April 2006. So, what is their answer to "Why?"

• Aligning with IBM's AD strategy (Eclipse, WebSphere)
• Protect VAST investments
• Allow sufficient time to transition

How?

• Enable Transition strategy, tools, partners
• Provide extended support
• Define bridging and migration-readiness strategy
• Engage IBM services and partner expertise

"From a portfolio perspective, we are responding to the market". So, the options - All the paths lead to J2EE and WebSphere - you too can downgrade and become just as ineffective as your competition. I love the way they call it "modernization", btw. It has a marketing department approved kind of sound associated with it. Heh- Bruce Badger asked about .NET, and Greg said sure, you can move there too. In general, they are touting J2EE, Rational Rose tools, and Eclipse (Look, Eclipse is free! Never mind those WebSphere licenses behind the curtain).

"Sometimes technologies feel the weight of change around them, or their failure to move" - I could be snarky about that, but hey - fill in your own comment there :) They are offering an additional two years of support after EOS (End of Service) for customers who want it. This is being delivered through the existing support organization and their field service people. Now it's on to partners:

Synchrony Systems and CSC Solution Services, who they will be using to migrate people over to WebSphere and Java. He got to Instantiations last, which is who is providing ongoing support/development for VA Smalltalk. His real emphasis is on "Transitioning and Modernizing" with Synchrony and CSC (read: Move to WebSphere).

So - Instantiations gets VA licensed to them, allowing derivative works from the current product. "That might be appropriate for some customers" - boy, is he ever playing down any desire to stay with Smalltalk. The IP has not been transferred to Instantiations, and there are a few things that they will not be allowed to ship. Mike Taylor (Instantiations) said that it mostly involved an inability to sub-license or open source the product. Eric Clayberg (Instantiations) pointed out that the Smalltalkers left at IBM went out of their way to make this all happen - would have been easier on them career-wise to just let it die.

A positive note from John O'Keefe - he's pleased that Instantiations has picked up the codebase and is willing to work with it.

Synchrony - supposedly, 40+ successful migrations. Odd that the website only has 2, and those projects don't list any recent details. I rather suspect that most of those are Smalltalk to Smalltalk, and mostly involve VSE to VA. "These guys are *cough* Smalltalk bigots *cough* deep down".

And CSC - they bring the J2EE migration gnomes along.

Meanwhile - if you want actual modernization - go download Cincom Smalltalk, and see what it really looks like.