Re: Why is GNUstep less successful than GTK and Qt??

[Robert J . Slover]

Greetings,

Sun evil.  Hmm.

A long time since I have posted anything here.  Life gets in the way.
Regardless, I thought I'd take a few minutes to reply to this.  If you
need a contact at Sun, go to www.sun.com.  Click on the "Press"
link under "Resources".  On the following page, click "Executive
Speeches" under "Editorial" in the sidebar.  Find Scott's COMDEX
speech in the sidebar.  His address is in there.  I've BCC'd him with
this message.  Write to him yourself, I have.  If there is something
besides drivel in the message, he will even write back.  I have the
emails to prove it (archived somewhere).

Several years ago now, I was stuck at work over what was supposed
to be the Thanksgiving Holiday break at the college I worked at.  I
was there because a product we depended on for batch scheduling
on the VAXen (PolyCenter Scheduler) had been dropped by DEC as
part of the suicide pact between Bob Palmer and the DEC board in
making DEC small enough to sell off.  It was grandfathered in on the
Campus Software License Grant, so colleges could still use it.  Except
DEC kept forgetting to put the license keys on the CD's.  I was
waiting for DECpaq support to fax me new keys and was bored,
and more than slightly ticked about the tremendous waste of effort
when a beautiful product (which PolyCenter was) dies from these
outside issues.  So I had time to think.  And write.  And I thought of
Lighthouse, and of SunSoft research projects like PIAZZA:
 ( http://www.izix.com/pro/lightweight/images/piazza.pdf ).  So
I wrote to Scott.  Of course, as I tend to do, I wandered to related
topics, and as a tangent to asking that these boneyard applications
be released, mentioned that it might be fruitful to commoditize the
office application market as the only possible effective fight
there against mickeysoft.  This was the same tactic that 'they' had
used to unseat Netscape, but of course, Sun is in no position to
force apps onto desktops.   Still...  I got back a terse but 
enthusiastic
response.  I hoped this was to mean the Lighthouse apps would see
the light ... instead, I think we got Open Office.  I am not
complaining, but I can't ever see myself doing C++ in my spare time.

Perhaps the Lighthouse apps are intellectually encumbered in some
way?

Anyway, I have high regard for Sun.  I have high regard for a CEO
that will respond to his own email (and the response came from an
internal engineering address -- gotta like that).  I've only seen Steve
Jobs respond to email twice, and his address is enormously difficult
(if even possible) to track down.  Any place else I've ever written to
is a black hole...nothing ever comes back.  I love Sun hardware, to
the point I run a Sparc 20 here at home, sitting under my Mac.
They've done a lot of arguably good things, like release NFS and
the Sun RPC standards, Open Office, etc., etc.  They do
meaningful research, and publish it.  They keep all of their old docs
online, and updated with the rest of their web design (their docs
for their implementation of OpenStep are still available on
docs.sun.com).  I don't think the OpenStep specification would have
ever been 'open' without Sun's involvement.  I think their involvement
there and in buying Lighthouse was probably meant to cherry-pick
engineers to work on Java, but that is business.

Sun makes some mistakes, but I do not consider Sun 'evil'.

Scott, please see:
Petition to make Lighthouse Application Suite Free Software at:
http://www.petitiononline.com/laafs/petition.html

--Robert


On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 01:18  AM, Tobias wrote:

> > > could somebody get the lighthouse
> > > apps out of Sun, _pretty_please_ :-)
> >
> > Working on it... no kidding.  See sig. ;)
>
> i allready signed this petition (both to be exact).
> but i think sun will not simply ignore these requests.
>
> so what do you think about asking sun about the price, we would have 
> to pay,
> to buy these *dead* applications.
> gnu has bought commercial applications before. so this should be ok.
> ( and i am pretty sure, we would get some donations, i would donate 
> for sure.
> btw: we could credit all that have donated in the "About Lighthouse" 
> dialog.
>
> add: this is your chance to get onto a first class software project 
> for only a
> small fee!! )
>
> is there somebody, who has/had contact with sun, or knows how to 
> contact them
> about that matter.
>
> btw: gregory, i do not want to undermine the petition, i just think 
> sun is
> evil... ;)
>
> ~ibotty
>
>
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