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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.
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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.
"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!!!
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."