Hi guys I'm really interested in seeing this egg/chicken problem solved by getting something out the ground. for the visibility of Pharo and smalltalk in general. So I would love to see some proposals and some budgets to see how to Pharo association/ESUG/Consortium/other companies could put money on the table to get started. Stef
My friend pays $350 month for a bunch of apps, and considers it money well spent. I think that the developer community has a tendency to compare the price of of services with the price of open source software (free) and assume that no-one will pay. In the commercial world though, the comparison is with what it would cost you for hosting PLUS sys admin.. which, for most organisations is both a pain in the ass and very expensive.
Yes, any serious company making real money, will normally pay closer to $1000/month and often much more for infrastructure.
Regarding Heroku, I guess it would be a manageable, realistic project to do a third-party build pack for Pharo Smalltalk, with interfaces to some of the underlying infrastructure (Glorp for PostgreSQL, memcached, maybe also ampq) and to integrate a bit in their ecosystem (logging, monitoring), using some base image containing the necessary libraries, with some vm+image on dynamo validation.
There are many others (and thus examples):
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/third-party-buildpacks
This does cost work and thus money.
I know there are ways to monetize addons in the Heroku world, so that is a possibility as well.
Sven
-- Sven Van Caekenberghe http://stfx.eu Smalltalk is the Red Pill