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GNUstep Project Gets New Chief Maintainer
stivi writes "OSNews is reporting that Gregory Casamento has accepted the position of GNUstep Maintainer. Adam Fedor, former GNUstep leader writes: 'After over 15 years of being the Chief Maintainer for GNUstep, I've found I have too many other responsibilities to devote as much time to GNUstep as is necessary. I still plan on contributing to GNUstep in the future in a lower capacity.' Gregory has been a prolific developer for GNUstep for the past seven years and is currently the maintainer for Gorm (the graphical interface designer) and the GUI library. I think he will make a great choice to lead GNUstep in the future. New plans for change have been set up already. Thank you Adam for the past, congratulations Gregory to the future."
If they get serious about more complete source compatibility with Cocoa, it could go a long way to attracting Mac developers to Linux if they can accomplish ports of many Cocoa apps with simple recompiles.
was (and is), that few people realised how great the original NeXTStep environment - which GNUStep attempts to clone - was.
:-)
I was already around as a CS major at the time NeXTStep basically failed in the marketplace due to a) asinine marketing/pricing on the part of NeXT Inc. and b) the fact that everytime we showed the NeXTStep environment to fellow CS students and CS faculty, you would mostly get blank stares, and a few polite remarks. But no more.
Few "got it" how easy this was to use - concepts like the seperation of the user interface specification from the core logic of a program simply did not register with people weaned on TurboVision ("one line per code for each UI element"), and Apple has (probably rightfully so) more or less given up on educating people on how great the current successor to NeXTStep (Cocoa) is.
Nowadays, people code for OS X because OS X is seen as a hip system with a small but viable installed base, and the fact that the dev tools are extremely nice is just an added bonus.
So if GNUStep is just an Open Source version of something that is obsolete, why care at all?
Well, because the likes of KDE could have had it so much easier if they had used something like GNUStep (the structure of which is pretty revolutionary), instead of toolkits like QT, which were developed to be just a "better Win32" API.
Make no mistake, QT/KDE et al. turned out to *be* a better Win32/Foundation class environment, but I guess that most folks who were ever proficient in developing for the NeXT environment will agree, that a widely used and enhanced GNUStep would have been even more productive than that.
And still could be someday - after all, Linux desktops are such a melting pot of different toolkits and environments, that perhaps some "killer GNUStep apps" (graphics apps, like an Illustrator clone would be a good start) could get people to notice GNUStep again.
One can always dream...
Just my $0.2E-32
A.
In 1985, Steve Jobs left Apple to found a new computer company. His company attracted many very talented individuals. They created the NeXT computer, a very advanced, very beautiful computer running a Unix-like operating system eventually called NeXTStep, which eventually became OSX.
I use NeXTStep as proof that Microsoft has set the computer industry back 12 years. NeXTStep used display postscript on both the video display, and for printing. It was fully-preemptive, with a clean, POSIX-compliant system interface. The application framework was extremely advanced, and extremely easy to code for. Using Objective-C as the programming language of choice, NeXTStep had some very advanced programs for the time, such as Lotus Improv, the spreadsheet MS-Excel wishes to become when it grows up.
As it is, MS-Windows still lags behind NeXTStep by a good amount, especially in terms of ease-of-development, ease-of-use, and aesthetics.
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web on a NeXT.
Anyway, when it became apparent that NeXT was not going to survive, they released a bunch of specifications that together made up the technical documentation for OpenStep, based on NeXTStep. The idea was that OS vendors could implement OpenStep APIs, and application vendors could target a single API for multiple OSs.
GnuStep is an implementation of the OpenStep API, and other programs to recreate the NeXT environment on any Unix-like operating system. Applications written for GnuStep can be recompiled to target OS X with little-to-no work.
Basically, when people say Linux needs an easy-to-use, easy-to-develop-for application environment and desktop, they are talking about GnuStep, whether they know it or not. It's not as flashy as GNOME or KDE, but it's much cleaner, easier to develop for, easier to use, and much more consistent. Where both GNOME and KDE try to be similar to MS-Windows, GnuStep tries to be like NeXTStep, the best application development and user desktop ever created.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.