Re: question about low availability of Mac OS X applications that has GnuStep edition

[David Chisnall]

I'd say it's a combination of several things:

1) GNUstep is really bad at marketing.  I've met a lot of Cocoa programmers who 
have never heard of it.

2) There's no such thing as porting to GNUstep.  There's porting to Windows 
using GNUstep, porting to FreeBSD using GNUstep, porting to Linux using GNUstep 
(which typically means porting to some specific distro, using GNUstep).  With 
the exception of Windows, most of these platforms have such a small commercial 
software market that it's not worthwhile even small amounts of effort for a 
port, and the Windows version of GNUstep is even less well-known than the *NIX 
version.

3) AppKit compatibility is not as good as it could be.  Apple has been 
encouraging the use of bindings for ages (since 10.2), because they massively 
reduce the amount of boring code that you need to write, but GNUstep only has 
working bindings in some simple cases.  Gorm still doesn't support bindings, so 
it's very hard for people to test bindings code with GNUstep - they either need 
to set them up manually or use Interface Builder on OS X to create nibs (which 
may not work - no idea how well bindings support in our nib loader works).

4) There are other frameworks that are missing.  We have a CoreGraphics 
implementation, but it's not yet integrated into the rest of the system, which 
makes it largely useless.  CoreAnimation depends on CoreGraphics quite heavily, 
so we can't do the one until the other is finished.  Apps that use QuickTime 
need to be ported to libavcodec or similar (I don't think we'll ever write a 
QuickTime drop-in replacement, although I might write an AVFoundation 
replacement, since it seems like a cleaner API, and hopefully it will appear on 
OS X 10.7).

There are quite a few hippyware Cocoa apps that have GNUstep versions, but 
these are usually not done by the original author.

Cenon and TestPlant are the only two commercial off-the-shelf packages that I 
know of with GNUstep ports.

David

On 24 Jan 2011, at 04:20, Zhang Weiwu, Beijing wrote:

> Hi. I have one question as a stupid user: why there is no commercial Mac
> OS X application that was ever offered also offer GNU Step binary?
> 
> I had been using Mac OS on one computer and gnustep on another for 5
> years without coming across one application that runs on both. I dimly
> remembered around 3 years ago I even wrote to one of the vendor asking
> them to port to gnustep saying "it's just a re-compilation" and they
> replied they didn't know gnustep could do that and yet it's not a
> priority now for them to test if what I said is true, but would be happy
> to do that when they got the time, which usually means forever.
> 
> No criticism. I am too stupid to know the detail to comment insightfully
> on any topic being discussed here. I am juts being curious why it's not
> already happening that a lot of Mac OS applications (and AppStore
> applications) water-flow to Linux users like they did in Apple's new world.
> 
> Best regards
> 
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