Bill--
I feel the same sort of frustrations with using Smalltalk to develop
free (or commercial) software. All the Smalltalks have various issues --
just different ones. It is very frustrating.
Squeak has licensing issues and is not modular, but it is very
cross-platform and has a big community. GST is modular and well
licensed, but can be difficult to install and has a small community and
the GUI is incomplete and not very complete or cross-platform (things
continue to improve off course). VisualWorks is modular and very
cross-platform but it isn't free-as-in-freedom (or even
free-to-distribute-commercial as in buy it once). VW also lost ENVY
which I liked. OTI had a great embedded Smalltalk but it is very
proprietary. Dolphin is windows only and not free-as-in-freedom.
Smalltalk/X has a sort-of-free license but not quite IIRC, and no
history as a free software community. The Java Smalltalks are orphaned
for the most part and incomplete (but cross-platform and mostly free,
except for the Squeak-derived ones which suffer from the Squeak
licensing issues).
Because of their communities, it seems to me that GST and Squeak are the
major players if you want a free platform going forward.
You can see my comments on Squeak when I was active on the Squeak-dev
list, say here:
"Belling the cat of complexity (was: Ship it with Squeak)"
http://liststest.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2000-June/001371.html
That was one reason I experimented with creating "Embedded Squeak"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/squeak/readme.txt
(which was a headless Squeak, like GNU Smalltalk in some ways) though
that code is so old don't use it. :-)
You can see an example of my frustration with the Squeak licensing here:
http://osdir.com/ml/lang.smalltalk.squeak.foundation/2003-04/msg00046.html
http://osdir.com/ml/lang.smalltalk.squeak.foundation/2003-04/msg00045.html
Even though they are (many years) trying to fix it now, I still question
if they are getting a proper copyright assignment from *Disney* which
has a copyright statement in the code. But I can hope.
Beyond the licensing issue, here are other related links on Squeak
issues from around 2000:
http://liststest.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2000-June/013722.html
http://liststest.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2000-June/021045.html
http://liststest.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2000-June/022013.html
From that middle link:
"I'm sorry if I keep coming across as a broken record in most of my
posts to the list over the past few years. A major thrust of what I say
is always the same (perhaps becoming clearer over time as other people
refine it).
To become a serious platform, Squeak needs:
* to be modular (namespaces, buildable image, maybe inter-VM/"object
space" debugging),
* to have at least one stable, easy to use, lockable, scalable GUI,
* to be event driven, and
* to interface easily with the outside world of code.
"