UIKit implementation by Iain Merrick

[Ethan C]

Hi everyone,

        We have great news! Back in 2014, Iain Merrick worked with Inkle Studios to port their games "Sorcery!", and later "80 Days" and the "Sorcery!" sequels, to Android using OpenGL ES 2. Later, he used the same codebase to port those games to macOS and Windows. He has recently agreed to share his UIKit implementation with us, and his code can be found at https://github.com/more-please/inkle-android. I am working to get this code to work on GNUstep-on-clang-on-Linux, and later on to get it back to Android and Windows. You can see my revisions here: https://github.com/ethanc8/inkle-android. Most of the code compiles rather nicely, but the UIKit mainloop is stuck in a thousands-of-lines file with many platform-specific intricacies, so I haven't ported that over yet.

        This is quite an important contribution, which if we can properly use this code, could give us a large start on being able to port iOS applications to other systems, and harness the large iOS developer ecosystem. However, the age of his UIKit code and the fact that Inkle's games did not use as much UIKit as some more UI-heavy applications might would require us to do major revisions. Additionally, we have not yet received copyright assignment from him, and in the case that that couldn't happen, it might be difficult to ensure that the project is legally sound. Finally, as GNUstep approaches compatibility with macOS and iOS, we may draw the attention of Apple's management and legal teams, which may invite unpleasant legal circumstances. Therefore, it would be important to make sure that the Free Software Foundation can defend the project against lawsuits and that the project is on as sound legal ground as possible. This may necessitate the rewriting of all of the header files in Iain's UIKit implementation, and further talks with Iain about legal matters.

Thanks,

Ethan Charoenpitaks