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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.
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.
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.
Download Photoshop here http://gimp.org/
No. If there were a market for a Linux build of Photoshop, then Adobe would find it much easier to port the Windows version with WINE than the OS X version with GNUstep (and I say this as a GNUstep developer). Applications like OmniGraffle, however, would be easier to port. I think we already implement most of what OmniGraffle needs, but there are lots of missing bits of APIs. I have a Summer of Code student who is working on getting the CoreAnimation / CoreGraphics stuff integrated (our current GUI code uses the NeXT DisplayPostscript APIs) which should help with a lot of things.
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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.
"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..."
And that was just the summary, I didn't even have to rtfa to get that!!!
... 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.
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.
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."