I'm trying to figure out what's going on with Dolphin Smalltalk. A little over a year ago, they announced a partnership with Lesser Smalltalk to produce a "next gen" Dolphin. In that announcement was this:

At present, no pricing structure has been set for the new platform. However, following its release we still intend to continue to keep the current Dolphin products (DPRO and DCE) in existence. Hence, the Next Generation Dolphin environment will likely be positioned at a price point above that of the existing Dolphin Professional product.

At the time, it seemed that the existing products were pretty much in maintenance, with the DNG thing being the go forward position. Now it's gotten interesting - they are looking at "pledges" to pay for a new version (i.e., not in the DNG direction):

To this end, we have decided to put forward a short-term proposal using a simplified version of this scheme. A more complex version might give users the ability to effectively vote on the contents of the future release but here (to test the viability of the PledgeWare idea) we are going to ask for pledges towards a new release of Dolphin Smalltalk 7 with the following fixed set of features

That sounds like good news for Dolphin enthusiasts (and, IMHO, for Smalltalk in general). I'll be curious to see how that works out.

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