On 16.12.2006, at 23:24, Gregory John Casamento wrote:
I now ask these questions: What was the original goal of NeXT with
their OS? Should that goal not also be the same for GNUstep?

The original goal of OPENSTEP was to create a crossplatform set of
libraries which could be easily used.  These platforms consisted of
Windows (OPENSTEP Enterprise 4.2/Windows), Solaris (OPENSTEP 1.1/ Solaris), &
Mach (OPENSTEP 4.2/Mach) were the implementations of this created by
Sun and NeXT while NeXT was still in business. There were proposals to
have an OPENSTEP implemented under HP-UX on the PA-RISC architecture,
but that didn't happen prior to the buyout by Apple. On each one of these platforms, mainly windows, OPENSTEP was made to look/act like the operating system it was on. As you can see, GNUstep's purpose is *precisely* the same
as OPENSTEP's.

And NeXT clearly failed with this strategy ;-)

I guess the difficulty here is that there are some who understand GNUstep as something like OPENSTEP Mach 4.x, an entire OS or at least desktop environment running on a Unix/Linux OS, whereas there are others who understand GNUstep as an implementation of the OpenStep API specification (with some - but not all - Cocoa additions/changes) which integrates seamlessly into its host system. In this case a Windows port is what probably matters most (business wise). Right now GNUstep is a mix of both which makes nobody completely happy.

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip




_______________________________________________
Gnustep-dev mailing list
Gnustep-dev@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev

Reply via email to