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GNUstep Kickstarter Campaign Launched
borgheron writes "A maintainer of GNUstep has launched a Kickstarter campaign to get the resources needed to make GNUstep more complete and bring the implementation to API compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6's Cocoa. This will allow applications for Mac OS X to run on GNU/Linux with a simple recompile using new tools developed by the GNUstep team to directly build from xcodeproj project files. If the Kickstarter project is funded beyond its $50,000 goal, it's possible that WebKit and Darling might also be completed allowing applications built on Mac OS X to run without the need for a recompile... think WINE-like functionality for Mac OS X applications on other platforms... including Windows, Linux, BSD, etc."
GNUStep is pretty useful now, but increased coverage of newer Cocoa APIs would be nice, and Darling in particular is interesting by providing a portable Mach-O binary loader.
Does this mean that we could run the Adobe suite on Linux? Maybe Dreamweaver as well? Or is this a hopeless dream. Anything is better than having to use the Mac OSX Finder.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
NeXTSTEP was one of the many closed source OSes kicking about in the early 80s to mid-90s. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he turned NeXTSTEP into MacOS X.
GNUStep is an open source API based on the NeXTSTEP API.
Why should you support it? If you really really want MacOS X software Y this will make porting it to your-OS-of-choice a lot easier.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Why bother duplicating the exact functionality of a commercial software, only for it to be labelled open source? Are they doing this for only open-source sake? Mac OS X is certified UNIX, and with some care, applications cab easily be made to compilable on multiple Linux distros. GUI application is an entirely different matter, but there are cross-platform solutions like Qt, GTK, Java swing, etc. There are lots of technologies that are encumbered by patents in Mac OS X, like Time Machine, Core Image, or QTKit. And how the hell will GNUStep enable integration with iCloud for those applications that use it?
I don't understand the project either. Why would I want to run OS X apps on GNU/Linux? Probably there are a few niches like Photoshop that might want to run them but seriously, how many cool apps are on OS X that NEEEEDDD to run on other OSes? I would like to see more money thrown ant Wine not on GNUStep.
Yes, Apple was bought by NeXT for -429 M dollar and -1.5 M Apple shares.
Apple is a continuation of NeXT, we know this because the CEO of NeXT was the same person as the CEO of Apple after the takeover of Apple by NeXT.
And OS X is a continuation of NeXTSTEP, we know this because the class names of the API still start with the letters "NS".
I like this campaign. Objective C is continually in the Top 5 of the most widely used languages (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html). It is a very nice, simple object oriented C dialect. It is used on OS X and iOS, the latter of which is installed on hundreds of millions of devices (http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/23/apple-over-500-million-ios-devices-sold/). Both operating systems heavily utilize Cocoa as their framework
Having better or even any Cocoa support on Linux would help to get developers to target both world. Linux on the one side, and iOS/OS X on the other side. I think this is well worth for all Linux users to chip in some money (even if it's only $1).
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The only concern I have is they do seem to be looking at it more as a framework for porting, which is the least important use from my perspective. This is the tool to build the better desktop on linux everyone claims to want.
GNUstep aims to implement the APIs that Cocoa uses. This has a natural use as a porting tool, but the main reason we're implementing the APIs is that we want to use them (which has the unfortunate side effect that ones we don't like tend not to be implemented quickly, even if lots of OS X code uses them). Over in Étoilé (which, no doubt, Slashdot's early-'90s character encoding support will mangle: Etoile with accents on both 'e's) we're building frameworks for building better environments, some of which also work on OS X and some of which don't.
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Because a lot of us on Macs are stuck on 10.6 and lots of OS X applications are targeting that group?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
NeXTstep - on those black workstations - was the first UNIX workstation that I found a breeze to use in college - in sharp contrast to either the vt100 terminals w/ SunOS C-shell prompts, or X-terminals running - at the time - either Openlook or DECwindows. I could log into my UNIX account on a NeXT, and then either do my assignments, or be on Usenet. Somehow, it wasn't as easy on other UNIX terminals.
For this reason, I'd root for NEXTSTEP to be a common OS across UNIXstations, and that looked like it might happen when Sun & HP both had projects porting NEXTSTEP to the SparcStations and HP-9000 workstations. But before that could really go far, NeXT got acquired by Apple, and so that idea went away.
GNUSTEP is a way to get that dream on to any platform. GNUSTEP is OpenStep, as implemented by the GNU project. It is FOSS, and therefore, it could theoretically be ported to any platform, giving it a usable UI. The project, as w/ most FOSS ones, had been languishing, but if there is a company that drives it, it could well make some important inroads and improvements in the FOSS world. Particularly be a good alternative to KDE in the marketplace. Also, while there are X based desktop managers like WindowMaker or AfterStep, making something like GNUSTEP would enable the environment to be ported and run on any platform, regardless of whether it has X or not. One may not even need Wayland or Mir.
The biggest reason to promote this is to recreate the paradigm of RAD, but on FOSS platforms, making them more viable for businesses to adapt. Today, the main roadblock to FOSS is the lack of applications, and also the fact that one would have to hire a staff of experts to have a proper platform for the corporate environment. With something like GNUSTEP, the level of expertise required could be more on the higher levels of application development.
Once such a platform is there, it would also be easier to develop cross platform applications, and make organizations less dependent on one type of hardware or another.
Is Android "Linux"? Yes; it uses the Linux kernel. Is it the same platform as GNU/Linux (Linux + glibc + Coreutils + X11)? Not for this purpose. The use of "GNU/Linux" emphasizes that this project aims to reimplement Cocoa on GNU/Linux, not to reimplement Cocoa Touch on Android/Linux.
Where can I find ut more about Opal? I checked out Wiki, and this was what it showed:
So where can I find out more?
Also, does GNUSTEP require anything like X, Wayland or Mir? Or can it be implemented directly on an OS? How much of an OS has to be there - like can GNUSTEP be simply ported on to Minix 3.x? Or does it need both Userland and kernel to be there?
... I think having a complete and competent objective-c development platform on Unix/Linux is a very good thing. Even if it is up to OS X 10.6 level - plenty of Mac users still run 10.6 and as far as a platform goes 10.6 is still pretty powerful.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This isn't about running OS X apps. This is about having the legendary NextSTEP rapid application development tools and some level of source compatibility between OS X and other Unix. Couldn't give a shit about OS X applications running on Linux personally, but if it means that Unix/Linux can piggyback off the huge numbers of developers learning to code for iOS and OS X, we might actually get some applications written that have a UI worth a damn. Interface builder makes the UI somewhat segregated for the code it is connected to. I.e., you can get a UI guy who actually knows shit from clay with regards to UI design to sort the UI out without needing to write or modify any code.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
SO you mean, about 15 years ahead of where KDE and Gnome are today? I'm not actually trolling here. This is where NEXT application development was in 1992.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
There isn't a lot of difference in the core Cocoa API between the later versions. Many, MANY OS X developers target 10.6 because it runs fine under everything more recent and unless you're using the latest goodies, which are unlikely to be ported by GNUStep anyway, there's no difference.
NeXTSTEP was one of the many closed source OSes kicking about in the early 80s to mid-90s. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he turned NeXTSTEP into MacOS X.
GNUStep is an open source API based on the NeXTSTEP API.
Kind of, this simplifies things a bit...
When Steve Jobs was at NeXT, the programming interfaces were standardized and turned into an open specification that any platform could implemented. This was called OpenStep. There were several implementations of OpenStep. OpenStep for Mach was what NeXTStep morphed into after the specification was released. Sun shipped a version of OpenStep for Solaris. A Windows NT port was created called OpenStep Enterprise. And then finally for Linux the GNUStep project was created (GNUStep actually started a bit before the OpenStep specification was released).
So while NeXTStep was mostly (not entirely) closed, the entire API around it was designed to be open and implemented on different platforms. GNUStep is the project to implement the open spec on Linux, still going long after that spec got wrapped into OS X and unstandardized.
There was a time that Apple considered still running with the ideas behind OpenStep. It was called Rhapsody, and it had both a full operating system that ran on both Intel and PowerPC hardware, and an environment for Windows NT and legacy Mac OS. For whatever political reasons this project didn't work out (Adobe and Microsoft had particularly strong objections to having to port to OpenStep.)
Short version: Things are a little more complicated than NeXTStep being "closed source."
"One could say that GNUstep is a very nice woman, but without proper make-up and with a shabby dress. Although the expert eye could see the star sparkle, the average person maybe would prefer a more normal female with choosen make-up and dress." -- http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=13189460&postID=112497309425424497
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"free unlike Qt"
Are you from the past?