Re: The Path of GNUstep (Was: Re: Gnustep + mac + windows? Possible?)

[Chris Hanson]

At 2:27 AM -0400 9/24/02, Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> This time, you are absolutely wrong. Most OS X developers know about
> GNUstep. Why aren't they here? The simple fact is, not many of them CARE.

Not entirely.

Many, many people have been watching GNUstep for years.  They just 
judge it not ready for prime time yet.  And many Mac OS X developers 
are interested in building great applications, not working on the 
core frameworks.

Three things that would get Mac OS X developers using GNUstep:

* 100% of the basic AppKit working.  I don't know where GNUstep 
stands on this right now. It doesn't have to have all the bells and 
whistles that the Cocoa AppKit does, but it also has to not have huge 
gaps in major functionality.

* The ability to easily port from Cocoa to GNUstep.  A simple nib 
converter that's completely independent of GNUstep would go a long 
way here.

* Windows support that they can deploy commercial applications with 
(i.e. no cygwin).

Right now, it looks like it'll take a bunch of effort to port the 
average Cocoa application to GNUstep, which many developers would 
rather devote to making their Cocoa applications better.  (Isn't the 
interface in GNUMail.app hard-coded?  That's something most Cocoa 
programmers won't be interested in doing.  At all.)  The tipping 
point, I think, will be Windows compatibility: If their investment of 
effort means they can also ship their applications for Windows, they 
may put it in.

  -- Chris
  -- Mac OS X developer, long-time GNUstep observer

PS - I have a couple of Open Source frameworks for Cocoa that GNUstep 
developers may also find useful.  Check out BDControl and 
BDRuleEngine on the bDistributed.com web site.  If there's interest, 
I'll put tarballs of the latest sources on the site.  (The code is 
under a BSD-style license.)

--
Chris Hanson                      |  Email: cmh@bDistributed.com
bDistributed.com, Inc.            |  Phone: +1-847-372-3955
Making Business Distributed       |  Fax:   +1-847-589-3738
http://bdistributed.com/          |  Personal Email: cmh@mac.com