It is with great regret and more than a touch of sadness that I have to announce that Blair and I have made the decision to stop selling and developing Dolphin Smalltalk. We will continue to distribute the free version of Dolphin X6 indefinitely but, as from today, we will not be selling the Professional version. Some limited support will remain in place for existing users of X6 but there will not be a future major release of Dolphin for .net (or Mac or Linux).
We have come to this point for a number of reasons, the most potent of which is the fact that it is just not commercially viable (and to be truthful it has never really been so) to continue development of the product. There are simply not enough people who are able to recognise that Smalltalk offers something much better than the tools and languages "du jour". The shift of Microsoft away from the Win32 API to the .net platform (and the associated presentation foundation) has not helped and would mean a dedicated development effort of sufficient intensity that we just can't commit to it given the potential returns.
We started Object Arts almost exactly 10 years ago with a view to continuing the development of Dolphin which had been started and then abruptly terminated at our previous company, Intuitive Systems Ltd. Both of us were of a mind that this was something that needed to be done; not only because Smalltalk was quite the best development environment we had come across but because we felt that the work already completed on Dolphin was some of the best we had achieved in our careers to that point. It seemed important that Dolphin Smalltalk should be carried forward and that other developers be given the chance to "see the light". These sentiments remain with us today but the cold reality is that we have to look for other sources of income for our families and the future.
As an example as to why this has become a necessary decision, I'd like to open up the sales figures for Dolphin Professional this last year. So far in 2007 we have received 29 orders and in the last 12 months, at total of 50 orders. We probably have an active user database of around 500 users but simple maths shows that this is plainly insufficient to support any business plan let alone one that needs to dedicate substantial additional effort for future development.
So what of the future? Blair has taken up a job with Microsoft Research in the UK and I am occupied full-time developing stock trading systems under the Alchemetrics banner (still using Dolphin Smalltalk). The latter should mean that Dolphin will not die quickly because we have a wealth of software that relies on it to continuing operating smoothly. The nature of Smalltalk with the fact that most of the source is "open" means that existing users should be able to continue using the Dolphin products and not have to port away to other platforms (and hopefully never to C# or Java). We will try to issue the 6.1 maintenance release that we have been using internally (wrapping all outstanding bug fixes) before the end of this year.
There will no doubt be a number of you who would suggest that we Open Source Dolphin. Of course, you are free harbour such opinions and to discuss the idea on the newsgroup but please do not expect us to be persuaded. It simply will not happen! Both Blair and I dislike the Open Source movement intensely and we would rather see Dolphin gradually disappear into the sands of time than instantly lose all commercial value in one fell swoop. But this is a discussion for another thread. The best, and probably only, way in which the future of Dolphin could be assured would be a sale of the assets to another company. Whilst we are not actively seeking buyers, serious negotiations can be started by writing to me at my e-mail address.
At this point, I cannot sign off without commenting on the enthusiasm and talent in the Dolphin community that has sustained us all these years. There are people on this newsgroup who have been with us since the early days back in 1997. There are a number of you who have supported Dolphin far beyond the call of duty and I sincerely thank you for this. I don't want to name names for fear that I forget someone but you know who you are and I thank you again. Doubtless, many of you will be disappointed by this decision but I hope that you understand now why this has to be.
Best regards,
Andy Bower Dolphin Support
PS: we came to this decision several weeks ago. For those of you who have recently purchased Dolphin Professional and are now unhappy with the decision, we will honour requests for a refund for any purchases made within the last 60 days. AB.
It is indeed a sad loss, I imagine especially after all you've put into it. Dolphin really is a wonderful product, which made it a pleasure to develop our own software. I for one wish you and Blair the best in your future endeavors.
Thanks so much for sharing the current situation and decision. I understand that it was difficult and I very much respect the business realities that brought you to this. It does, finally, answer the question of "How do these guys survive [on the low price they charge]?" You have done a great work. At work just yesterday we were discussing your OOPSLA demo of the pair programming dog. I still consider that the best demo of all time (does anyone have a video of it?). Thanks again for all you have done for the Smalltalk community.
This is sad news, albeit I have expected something like that because of your silence in this newsgroup for a while. What I didn't expect was the low number of interests in Professional Dolphin. I wish you and Blair all the best for your future and hope that you will remain a Smalltalker.
this is apparently the worst to come out for the question asked, but given the numbers it is completely understandable to me. I wish you both all the best for the future and thank you for this great environment!
Of course and hope for everyone in the Dolphin community that some way will open that allows Dolphins Professional Version to be (commercially) available to the world for some time longer. Time will tell...
Ciao
...Jochen
P.S. Of course I
P.P.S. Hopefully Blair has some influence at MS research that eventually leads to a more dynamic-language capable VM
On Aug 10, 2:55 pm, "Andy Bower" <bo...@object-arts.com> wrote:
> It is with great regret and more than a touch of sadness that I have to > announce that Blair and I have made the decision to stop selling and > developing Dolphin Smalltalk. We will continue to distribute the free > version of Dolphin X6 indefinitely but, as from today, we will not be > selling the Professional version. Some limited support will remain in > place for existing users of X6 but there will not be a future major > release of Dolphin for .net (or Mac or Linux).
Andy, what to say, I am really sorry that you and Blair had to stop working on Dolphin. That had to be a difficult decision. I would certanly like to see the way for Dolphin to survive, since I would really hate to stop using it as my main professional development tool, thou things do not seem great at the moment.
So if any window of opportunity opens, please consider it very carefully. I understand that Dolphin is your hard, quite possibly life work, and that you would hate to see its value disappearing. But if occasion arises so that you could put Dolphin in some safe hands, you would make great thing for us, your users, by doing so.
Lastly, please reconsider your decision that you would not sell Professional version. If you clearly state that you do not longer intend to develop and support it, I do not see why would you not let someone buy it if he chooses so. I guess there would not be many sales, but it would make me much more comfortable if I would know that I could buy some more licenses if I would need them.
would you consider to continue offering support for Dolphin if enough businesses sign up for some sort of support agreement with annual support payments which would be somewhere around 1500-2000 EUR or such?
I guess this would not be much for companies which would then still profit from not having to migrate to another language or environment.
I would also like to hear from others. How many companies here would be interested in seeing Dolphin being further supported and would not mind having to pay such sum for support? Or maybe if everyone interested would send private e-mail to Andy and then he would tell us his price to continue supporting Dolphin, simply based on the number of interested clients by following the formula price = needed budget / n. of customers ...
Anyway, thank you for all the work so far! Dolphin is simply the best Smalltalk development environment available.
> would you consider to continue offering support for Dolphin if enough > businesses sign up for some sort of support agreement with annual > support payments which would be somewhere around 1500-2000 EUR or such?
David, do the math. On the low side people of Andy and Blair's experience could expect 100k EUR each/year and as people who have set up their own business with a superb product could reasonably expect much more. Sop the customer base has to find, say, 200k to 400k EUR a year. Can the commercial Dolphin user base provide this kind of revenue?
> I guess this would not be much for companies which would then still > profit from not having to migrate to another language or environment.
How many Dolphin users are not one-person shops and have substantial (~> 1m EUR) revenue from a Dolphin product?
> I would also like to hear from others. How many companies here would be > interested in seeing Dolphin being further supported and would not mind > having to pay such sum for support? Or maybe if everyone interested > would send private e-mail to Andy and then he would tell us his price to > continue supporting Dolphin, simply based on the number of interested > clients by following the formula price = needed budget / n. of > customers ...
Flesh this out. You can expect some loss of customers due to the announcement. Blair must be replaced or tempted back from MS. Andy is (presumably) part-time as he (presumably) has commitments to the Alchemetrics product. What does a five year business plan look like with potental variations in the customer base of, say, 20% loss per year to 10% growth per year? What's the marketing budget? What would you spend where to grow the customer base (books, conferrence/trade show appearances, etc, etc).
> Anyway, thank you for all the work so far! Dolphin is simply the best > Smalltalk development environment available.
> Best regards,
> David
-- The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in Calvin & the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. Hobbes. -- Eliot ,,,^..^,,, Smalltalk - scene not herd
I completely agree with David! Please, could you consider this option? In our case, almost two years ago we had deciding about wich environment choose to migrate from VS. The strongest options was Dolphin and VW. We decided for Dolphin! And nowadays are very happy about that. For almost two year were working (two people) on build our new platform over Dolphin. Nowadays we have almost all our base frameworks developed over Dolphin and are considering include at least 5 developers more to the group and build our business products over these base frameworks. It is very difficult to us to say our customers that have waiting for our new products: "Wait for anothers two years because we have taken a wrong decision". I would like to know if David's option will be possible. We are decided to colaborate. Guys, don't let Dolphin die! Is the best Smalltalk environment!!!
> would you consider to continue offering support for Dolphin if enough > businesses sign up for some sort of support agreement with annual > support payments which would be somewhere around 1500-2000 EUR or such?
> I guess this would not be much for companies which would then still > profit from not having to migrate to another language or environment.
> I would also like to hear from others. How many companies here would be > interested in seeing Dolphin being further supported and would not mind > having to pay such sum for support? Or maybe if everyone interested > would send private e-mail to Andy and then he would tell us his price to > continue supporting Dolphin, simply based on the number of interested > clients by following the formula price = needed budget / n. of > customers ...
> Anyway, thank you for all the work so far! Dolphin is simply the best > Smalltalk development environment available.
hmm, Davids suggestion sounds resonable to me if it means some continued support for the /present/ Dolphin X6 Professional, not new developments (e.g. .net adaption etc.). MS/Windows has to support old apps and COM anyway for some more years, and occasional patch releases integrating just community-generated bugfixes should be not too much work assuming that at least Andy is working with Dolphin for some more time anyway.
I agree with you that an adaption of Dolphin to .net would be a major undertaking IMO and I can perfectly understand the reasoning behind the OA decision (albeit it does not make it less terrible for me). Given the numbers from Andy the present community cannot pay this.
Sad news, albeit not completely unexpected, and an understandable decision given the figures quoted.
It's been an interesting ride over the years so thanks to both of you for that. You've nearly always been able and willing to supply that little extra bit of support and background detail that users don't normally get and that will be missed.
David Gorisek <da...@remove-this.gorisek.com> wrote: > would you consider to continue offering support for Dolphin if enough > businesses sign up for some sort of support agreement with annual > support payments which would be somewhere around 1500-2000 EUR or such?
I have some experience with similar situations and in those cases I was rather amazed that on the one hand a great many people would complain about the horrible impact on them of a product's elimination yet when asked for a show of hands of companies that would be willing to help support the continuation of that product not a single one was willing to do so.
I'm very sorry to see Dolphin go this way, but I'm definitely glad I bought my copy when I could (and I guess happy that I made up 2% of their income for last year :P
I'd also like to suggest that they consider keeping the infrastructure in place to allow people to buy new Pro licenses. This will likely be critical to some users who need to add an additional development seat at some point or otherwise deal with evolving customer licensing requirements.
The other option I would suggest is to simply reduce the license fee for Pro to zero (assuming that's possible and not prevented by content they licensed from others) making it free to everyone to use.
This might actually increase the user base at no cost to them and it leaves open the possibility of some day doing a version 7.0 which they could of course charge money for again.
> It is with great regret and more than a touch of sadness that I have to > announce that Blair and I have made the decision to stop selling and > developing Dolphin Smalltalk. We will continue to distribute the free > version of Dolphin X6 indefinitely but, as from today, we will not be > selling the Professional version. Some limited support will remain in > place for existing users of X6 but there will not be a future major > release of Dolphin for .net (or Mac or Linux).
I am sorry to hear that. Thanks for 10+ years of a great product.
> We have come to this point for a number of reasons, the most potent of > which is the fact that it is just not commercially viable (and to be > truthful it has never really been so) to continue development of the > product. There are simply not enough people who are able to recognise > that Smalltalk offers something much better than the tools and > languages "du jour". The shift of Microsoft away from the Win32 API to > the .net platform (and the associated presentation foundation) has not > helped and would mean a dedicated development effort of sufficient > intensity that we just can't commit to it given the potential returns.
I am not a gambler, but I play a good game of five card draw when bragging rights are at stake. I very much doubt that Microsoft can get away with killing the win32 api. They very much want to do so (I have long described them as being without honor - now with one notable exception), but Linux is getting too good, OpenOffice too functional, MySQL too feature rich, etc., for them to get away with it any time soon.
With that said, I would urge you to build the alternate view system that (IIRC) is anticipated in your design. Choose GTK, wx, whatever, and give it go. You need list, text and image presenters; scrolling is essential. Eye candy really isn't all that important. I think you would find volunteers at the ready to remove the Win32 dependencies, with the result being a cross-platform tool with a functional (perhaps even elegant) GUI, and an Object-Arts VM.
For what return? Well...
> So what of the future? Blair has taken up a job with Microsoft > Research in the UK and I am occupied full-time developing stock trading > systems under the Alchemetrics banner (still using Dolphin Smalltalk). > The latter should mean that Dolphin will not die quickly because we > have a wealth of software that relies on it to continuing operating > smoothly.
... you suffer the addiction too. I think you could build a very good cross-platform system using Dolphin to boot strap it. With mutually agreeable licensing, I suspect you would find plenty of community help in tearing out the MS-dependent parts. The result would be a Dolphin-sprited platform we all can use to our respective advantages on the OS of our choosing, and regardless of what MS does next.
> The nature of Smalltalk with the fact that most of the source > is "open" means that existing users should be able to continue using > the Dolphin products and not have to port away to other platforms (and > hopefully never to C# or Java). We will try to issue the 6.1 > maintenance release that we have been using internally (wrapping all > outstanding bug fixes) before the end of this year.
Much appreciated.
Thanks again, and best wishes.
Bill
-- Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. bi...@anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Bill Schwab <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> wrote: > I am not a gambler, but I play a good game of five card draw when > bragging rights are at stake. I very much doubt that Microsoft can get > away with killing the win32 api.
Yeah, I'm still very happy with Dolphin's very nice Win32 implementation and feel no pressure at all to move to .net or cross-platform, or anything else, or at least not enough to let it force me to choose an inferior development tool when I have something better available.
I sent my thoughts to Andy and Blair via email, but just wanted to follow up with the primary focus here as well...
Keep your heads up. Most people don't get to spend 10 years of their lives doing what they love and contributing something truly great to their peers at the same time. Don't walk away from OA feeling defeated. Thump your chests and look back saying, "we did that!"
You made Dolphin. Dolphin brought me to Smalltalk, and [sadly?] I never want to look back and dread every waking day spent coding C++. Thanks, guys (I think)! :-)
Gavin Scott wrote: > Bill Schwab <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> wrote: >> I am not a gambler, but I play a good game of five card draw when >> bragging rights are at stake. I very much doubt that Microsoft can get >> away with killing the win32 api.
> Yeah, I'm still very happy with Dolphin's very nice Win32 implementation > and feel no pressure at all to move to .net or cross-platform, or > anything else, or at least not enough to let it force me to choose an > inferior development tool when I have something better available.
Re .net, I agree - I feel no pressure. Cross-platform is another story.
>> Eye candy really isn't all that important.
> Yes it is, otherwise we'd all use Squeak :-P
Smileys aside, I'm sorry you see it that way. Squeak's problems have very little to do with its being funny looking, and everything to do with ignoring (is it active contempt for??) wide-spread user interface conventions that work fairly well.
Have a good one,
Bill
-- Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. bi...@anest4.anest.ufl.edu
> would you consider to continue offering support for Dolphin if enough > businesses sign up for some sort of support agreement with annual > support payments which would be somewhere around 1500-2000 EUR or such?
> I guess this would not be much for companies which would then still > profit from not having to migrate to another language or environment.
> I would also like to hear from others. How many companies here would be > interested in seeing Dolphin being further supported and would not mind > having to pay such sum for support? Or maybe if everyone interested > would send private e-mail to Andy and then he would tell us his price to > continue supporting Dolphin, simply based on the number of interested > clients by following the formula price = needed budget / n. of > customers ...
Hi,
I would be interested in. I also welcome other ideas if this one does not turn to be workable, and I'll try to contribute to solution.
On 10 aug, 14:55, "Andy Bower" <bo...@object-arts.com> wrote:
> There will no doubt be a number of you who would suggest that we Open > Source Dolphin. Of course, you are free harbour such opinions and to > discuss the idea on the newsgroup but please do not expect us to be > persuaded. It simply will not happen! Both Blair and I dislike the > Open Source movement intensely and we would rather see Dolphin > gradually disappear into the sands of time than instantly lose all > commercial value in one fell swoop. But this is a discussion for > another thread. The best, and probably only, way in which the future > of Dolphin could be assured would be a sale of the assets to another > company. Whilst we are not actively seeking buyers, serious > negotiations can be started by writing to me at my e-mail address.
Under the circumstances, I think I can understand your reluctance towards the idea of open sourcing, but have you considered an in- between solution, such as doing a fund raising to open source the product. This is what the people behind Blender (a superb 3D modelling tool) did and now the product is thriving again. See http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history/ for more background information.
In any case I wish you all the best, Robin Barendregt
> Under the circumstances, I think I can understand your reluctance > towards the idea of open sourcing, but have you considered an in- > between solution, such as doing a fund raising to open source the > product. This is what the people behind Blender (a superb 3D modelling > tool) did and now the product is thriving again. See > http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history/ for more > background information.
I was not going to say anything just yet, but the idea occured to me too, and I know a lawyer who is a genuinely a good guy[*]. Without giving details, I have left a message asking what would be involved to collect money from the likes of us, arranging for a trigger if it hits the (no doubt substantial) amount required. Clearly any such framework has to cope with falling short, collecting too much, hassles returning funds, taxes, etc.
Here's hoping everyone involved will at least consider it.
Bill
[*] Seriously :)
-- Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. bi...@anest4.anest.ufl.edu
On Aug 10, 11:52 pm, Bill Schwab <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> wrote:
> I was not going to say anything just yet, but the idea occured to me > too, and I know a lawyer who is a genuinely a good guy[*]. Without > giving details, I have left a message asking what would be involved to > collect money from the likes of us, arranging for a trigger if it hits > the (no doubt substantial) amount required. Clearly any such framework > has to cope with falling short, collecting too much, hassles returning > funds, taxes, etc.
> Here's hoping everyone involved will at least consider it.
buying it out and open sourcing crossed my mind also.
Can't say that I'm surprised to hear this announcement... In fact, I was wondering when the proverbial shoe would drop. Given the fact that we haven't had any code release for D6 since last November or development news...
Thats why I downloaded VisualWorks 4 months ago... Pray for the best, prepare for the worst...
Shades of Digitalk all over again...
Life goes on as another Smalltalk Environment bytes the silicon dust...
Bill Schwab <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> wrote: > Gavin Scott wrote: > > Bill Schwab <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> wrote: > >> Eye candy really isn't all that important.
> > Yes it is, otherwise we'd all use Squeak :-P > Smileys aside, I'm sorry you see it that way. Squeak's problems have > very little to do with its being funny looking, and everything to do > with ignoring (is it active contempt for??) wide-spread user interface > conventions that work fairly well.
To me, the whole user interface system falls into the category of "eye candy", or at least "things that shouldn't make me want to throw up or run screaming every time I try to use the system".
