He approached the Squeakland team with dreamy ideas and plans. Don't know what is the state of affairs, but at that time I softly asked the team to be careful.
Le 03/03/2011 19:23, Stéphane Ducasse a écrit : > Hi guys > > I do not like to do that but in the past we got problems with Merik > Voswinkel. So I would like to warm you against > him. Several of you got approached and my advice is run away. Here are some > simple facts that happened to us. > > Stef > > From Lukas: > > Starting in 2007 Merik contacted various people from the Smalltalk community > offering them to take part in his startup. His projects and goals constantly > changed and nobody quite followed what he wanted to do. When he discussed > with me it was a mash up of Pharo, Seaside, Pier, Cola, and Croquet all > running on some custom cloud hardware ... > > Merik was working together with a "fake" research institute that only existed > as a website. I also learned that Merik is broke and lives from support of > the dutch government. Merik aggressively applies for venture capital and > writes huge proposals with weird ideas. On some of these proposals (that I > found on the web) he added Avi Bryant and myself as key team members (with > picture, bio and all), even if we both never accepted to do anything with him. > > > From marcus: > We got a note from the local organzier that a "Venture Capitalist" wanted to > attend ESUG and we could even use his Boat for the social event. But > strangely, this Venture Capitalist was not able to pay 400 EUR to attend. But > he was not able to say that. (we later learned that he is living of social > wellfare... so it would have been no problem to get him a free entrance). So > he offered to make videos. With very expensive "Professional" equipment. > > Later it turned out this kamera was actually the one of the guy organizing > the remote croquet talk, and he got somehow pissed too because Merik promised > him something for the camera use... > > Of course, Merik did have to operate the "Professional" Camera himself (not > often, maybe a day he did?). We had to threaten him violently to get the > completely useless tapes. (which are in some strange format and unprocessed). > > so, that's Merik. > > He was sending around "Business Plans" to people using team members that > never agreed. For example Lukas was used like that. If Lukas does not object, > I can send these "professional" business plans.. so you can ROFL, too. > (Lukas an me did a course right at that time about venture funding: > http://venturelab.ch/, so we know a little bit about these things...) > >> Then people could hack his machine on his seaside hosting because the ports >> were open so :) > No, he was running seaside with development tools enabled. He is completely > clueless. > > So pay attention. > > Stef > -- Education 0.2 -- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire
