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Gnustep - Any Thoughts/Opinions?
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Author:  nexter [ Mon Dec 03, 2018 5:27 pm ]
Post subject:  Gnustep - Any Thoughts/Opinions?

I remember in the old OS/2 days, having come to use XFree86 with Windowmaker, being intrigued by the Gnustep project. It was in its very early stages still, but the NeXT-clone developer tools were coming along OK.

That was ~20 years ago. Very little - given the interval! - seems to have changed since then, and there are still utter misconceptions and misinformation abounding concerning the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP OS and the OpenStep API etc. in the project. Unbelievable. And by the look of it, Windowmaker still has not been corrected to use gamma-corrected bitmaps and looks as gloomy as ever. Even more unbelievable.

It seems to me that Gnustep is little more than dead in the water. Which is a great pity as it had a lot of potential. But, it seems to me, that is the way with most open source, free software projects. What little momentum they may gather is soon lost. Twenty years, and what is there to show for Gnustep?

Apple and IBM - also back around the early/mid-90s - showed very little patience with OS development, e.g., Pink/Taligent, PPT, Workplace OS (the intended successor to OS/2), even OS/2. (The latter, funnily enough, absorbed a fair bit of code from Amiga OS in its early days, in return giving Commodore Arexx - a port of IBM's Rexx scripting language.) Two years seemed an exceedingly long time to both IBM and Apple, not to mention the vast sums spent on these projects. Indeed, the time typically taken in developing a complete OS seems to hover around the two year mark.

Yet, Gnustep, which isn't even an OS but little more than an application layer/API, has had *twenty* years and still has very little to show for it!

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

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