Re: Request for update and/or release of GDL2 and Renaissance

[Niels Grewe]

Am 30.01.2014 um 09:41 schrieb Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it>:

> Thanks for the kind words. It is nice to see somebody praising the "Bastion 
> of true OpenStep" while most people usually seek better GNOME or KDE 
> integration. You use no light works calling them "infesting" :) Lately the 
> world is infested by even worse stuff than those which, at the end, are 
> somehow our distant cousins. We have Unity, Windows 8, MacOS 10.9....
> 
> Anyway, more power? well we have the power we have in terms of users and 
> developers. Perhaps few people share your same ideas or, perhaps, even if 
> they do, they devote little of their actual time developing them.

Sorry, but since I have worked a lot on integration between GNUstep and 
‘foreign’ desktop environments in the past few years, I feel compelled to 
comment on this: I think it is ill-advised to draw too stark an opposition 
between ‘true OpenStep’ and the likes of KDE/Gnome/Unity etc. At least in my 
view, we are not trying to improve integration because we believe that their 
approaches to interacting with a computer are inherently better (in that case, 
I would probably be contributing to those projects instead), but precisely 
because we have limited manpower: Providing interfaces to hook into stuff that 
other people have already written (and are probably committed to maintaining 
for a while) is much more effective than writing everything from scratch. It’s 
also a good way for ‘onboarding’ people who just want to try out a piece of 
GNUstep-based software. If it blends into their existing setup nicely, I would 
assume that it’s a bit more likely that they stick around and contribute. So 
rather than looking at it as a dilution of the OpenStep ideals, I would ask you 
to look at it as an opportunity to get people interested in our project.

Thanks,

Niels