Comments on: Why not play with Croquet?

By: peter

peter — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 15:49:14 +0000

It’s great that Croquet uses the MIT license; but doesn’t the fact that it’s built in Squeak, which does not use the MIT license, make that almost irrelevant?

By: mtl3p

mtl3p — Sun, 07 May 2006 16:27:52 +0000

cool. thanks for the info.

By: David A. Smith

David A. Smith — Sun, 07 May 2006 14:28:57 +0000

The Croquet license is not the same as the Squeak license. Instead, it is basically the simple MIT license. Do whatever you want with it with NO restrictions on the code. The only restriction is that you may not call your system Croquet if it does not interoperate with the version provided via Viewpoints Research – Alan Kay’s non-profit, and available on the Open Croquet web site. They own the trademark. This is the way we intend to insure we don’t have fragmentation of the community, but still allow people to do what they want.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Sun, 07 May 2006 07:02:35 +0000

Smalltalk certainly gets a bad rap, Devil’sA… from me as well,sometimes. I admire the elegance, but find that it’s not generally the first tool I’d reach for to solve a problem… But I’d love an excuse to learn it better and really understand it. If OC gets some adherents, perhaps that will happen.

mlt3p, I didn’t hear anyone talking licensing issues here… then again, two of the big players here are SecondLife and Multiverse, both of which have licensing schemes pretty far from what you’ve proposed. I don’t know that you’d have much success getting Alan Kay away from the Squeak license, but I can put that question to David Smith, if you’d like…

By: Raph’s Website » Metaverse Roadmap roundup

Raph’s Website » Metaverse Roadmap roundup — Sun, 07 May 2006 06:06:37 +0000

[...] Ethan’s report on OpenCroquet The demo David Smith and Julian Lombardi gave last night had jaws dropping throughout the bar. Rather than a space you visit on a server through a client, OC is a three-D operating system that allows you to create objects and spaces that can appear on your system, or be imported into other systems. Each client is a server – there are no centralized servers. Each set of interactions between clients involves a negotiation – “Okay, you want to send me three-D models, textures, some text and an audio stream. I’m on a cellphone and don’t have a 3d rendering engine, so I’ll take the audio stream and the text…” [...]

By: mtl3p

mtl3p — Sun, 07 May 2006 05:11:06 +0000

You know that I raised this idea a while ago. Here's one response I got which I never followed up on. Do you have any info if licensing issues are one of the things holding up Croquet adoption? Or is it purely the lack of evangelists? "One key issue with Croquet which is probably stopping it from being more widely known and supported by free software developers is that the license for the underlying Squeak software is insufficiently free to allow inclusion in key Linux distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu. Getting that license fixed will be difficult and requires getting the likes of Apple and Disney to change the license. A blog post touching on this topic is at http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2005/09/001173.php An alternative open source immersive (but no 3d yet) peer to peer environment is Solipsis which can be found at http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki2/index.php/Main_Page It doesn't have the same sort of brain trust working on it as Croquet does, OTOH it is not encumbered by the same sort of licensing issues faced by Croquet. Recommendations: support efforts to fix the Squeak License and support Solipsis by participating in its community as users and developers. If the Solipsis community gets big enough, sooner or later someone will add 3d capabilities to it. One interesting possibility is to build both a WorldForge client and server into the Solipsis node."

By: Devil's Advocate

Devil's Advocate — Sun, 07 May 2006 02:57:23 +0000

“Watching a demo last night (in the hotel bar) of Open Croquet, the obvious question sprang to my mind: why isn’t the Immersive Web world flocking towards this platform?”

Because its written in Smalltalk and Smalltalk is dead – right? Isn’t it? It “failed” because Java “killed” it. Or Ruby, or Python or something.

You’ve hit upon the underlying stupidity of the computing world – great technologies are never revisited – once tried they are abandoned for the “next big thing” regardless of whether they were adequate or not.

In Smalltalk’s case, there has never been a programming environment created to rival it in elegance, flexibility, or power, and its a whole quarter of a century old for crying out loud.

Seriously, I hope Croquet will relaunch Smalltalk into the public eye, but there has been so much mindrot wrought by the J-heads and misguided C++ fans that I’m not holding out too much hope.