Re: A Critique: Getting Started with GNUstep on Windows

[Doc O'Leary]

For your reference, records indicate that 
Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> wrote:

> Absolutely --- an entire OS which you just install on some partition
> of a gpt disk
> would be perfect, imvho.
> 
> I would certainly download and use it.

For what?  I mainly use a Mac, but I have a number of images for virtual
machines that I run for specific purposes.  If GNUstep is going to
bother with the efforts of building an entire OS/distribution around
itself, it needs to explicitly state *why* that is important to the
project.

> And, to me, it would be infinitely preferable to a piece of middleware.

Having an OS doesn’t eliminate the need to support Cocoa as “middleware”.
People aren’t going to bother with a custom OS if there are no apps that
make it worth running.

> But the guys who are developing it rightfully have the choice of what
> to develop,
> and it is their exclusive decision on how to invest their time.

Sure, but the GNUstep project needs a vision/mission statement that is
independent of those individuals.  There have been *thousands* of
developers that have taken an interest in ObjC thanks to the success of
iOS, and GNUstep has done *nothing* to appeal to them.  

> So in my opinion, trying to hit a moving target (Mac) while wanting to
> run on all kinds of platforms (including Windows) is much too ambitious.
> Doing one job well seems much more in reach.

I agree.  Pick a platform as the main focus; it need not be a custom OS.
Get software written/ported that is so useful that people want to run it
on other platforms.  *Then* you worry about all those niche markets.

> However, those that are doing the work get to call the shots, and
> everyone else, including me, is a whiner (to paraphrase Torvalds just a 
> little).

I’m sure a lot of people are like me: I’d be doing more work if GNUstep
had a more sensible vision.  And fewer brogrammers; I don’t even like to
work with jerks when I’m being paid.

> So thanks all you gnustep developers for what you've done,

Indeed.  I’ve been thankful for 20 years, back when I couldn’t afford a
developer license from NeXT (what was it, $5k?).  Even then, the GNUstep
Foundation framework on my 486 laptop running Slackware (Linux was at
0.99.4 at the time, I think) was already everything I needed to bootstrap
my software up to seeing how useful ObjC was for my work.

But the world has been changing, and I haven’t seen the message of the
GNUstep project changing along with it.  Apple pushing Swift now means
a decline in a boom that GNUstep never took advantage of.  Yet I still
don’t see any serious discussions on these topics.

-- 
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly