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Re: A Critique: Getting Started with GNUstep on Windows


From: Riccardo Mottola
Subject: Re: A Critique: Getting Started with GNUstep on Windows
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2016 13:04:44 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0 SeaMonkey/2.39

Hi,

Doc O'Leary wrote:
For your reference, records indicate that
Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:

Speaking of a vision.  What I personally would like to see is a complete OS
distro built from the bottom up with GNUstep in mind.
Wrong kind of vision.  I’ve always been talking about a vision for how
*actual* people would find GNUstep useful.  Last time this topic came
up, it involved iOS, because that was the biggest community that was hot
on ObjC/Cocoa.  Now that Apple is pushing Swift, the stated vision either
has to involve that, or be very specific about *not* involving that.

your opinion.


Consider instead what people actually want and/or need.  On the Linux
desktop, they still want good apps.  And there are a lot of them, for
now in ObjC, that are written for the Mac.  Some are even open source,
but others it might require the company to get involved in considering
making their code work with GNUstep.  Outreach has always been more
important than chest-beating code commits.

If you think as the end-user a Linux/BSD desktop user, you are essentially right. Those users however are not coders, just users. If it were for them, they would like to have Adobe stuff or Apple apps on their laptops.

Others, more purists, choose Linux for the license, then they want "true" GNU/GPL/Mozilla software.


If I were to suggest a vision, it would be a hit list of notable Mac apps
that GNUstep *actively* supports.  The first one on the list is naturally 
TextEdit.  Phoenix Slides is something I’ve used that I think is nice.
There are countless others, I’m sure, but those are the two that come to
mind for which I’ve previously poked at the source.

Stop trying to beta new things that nobody else is going to bother to use.
Steer GNUstep towards supporting existing ObjC developers that think they
can benefit from running their software in a non-Apple ecosystem.  Purge
the project of the “what can you do for me?” attitude and welcome people
with an inviting “what can I do for you?”


Go around, ask... and you will discover that few do bother. Most mac developers are fine with Mac.
Others have stuff which is sheer unportable.

I personally did contact several Mac coders! Most can't be bothered with Linux, at most they are interested in Windows. However, why it is nice to support Windows, most open source people prefer not to work on windows.


Otheriwse, we spend our efforts in developing a tool which is useful for somebody else, but not fun for us.

This leads us to the same point again... and again. A nice free-software framework to have nice stuff (e.g. imagine GIMP, Firefox, OpenOffice written for us). Or just be a porting tool for foreign platforms, mostly used on Windows?

I do know where I want to go. Still, I do like to support Windows, I do want to help portability, etc. But second-tier.

Riccardo



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