Re: Some thoughts about GS

[Dennis Leeuw]

> - it never became a product for the masses, as of today it isn't even 
> included in any Linux distro I know off.

SuSE linux 7.0 does have GNUstep (or so am I told), Debian used to have GNUstep 
and I am in the progress of building new packages for Slackware as I did before.


> - the goals were/are IMHO too high for the few of us working on GNUstep

True, plus marketing does lack big time. You did the efforts on Freshmeat, and 
I tried Slashdot, both with little or no succes.


> - although superior, Objective-C never became very popular

See previous point.


> - in the meantime other technologies became very popular *and* powerful, such 
> as GNOME and KDE

True.


> i)  We continue to work on GNUstep like we always did. One day we will 
> perhaps have a 100% working OpenStep/Cocoa API clone.

I think the benefit of opensource is that a technology that is superior can 
exist while the whole world uses something else. We should not compare ourselfs 
with efforts like GNOME or KDE. KDE was started because people wanted a working 
solution on the desktop for Linux, GNOME was started to compete with KDE, those 
two efforts will probably blend some time in the future.

GNUstep has an entire different goal. The GUI is a side effect of the 
programming environment, but since all Visual Basic efforts for Linux and other 
Unix systems are nice they aren't as portable, free and aimed at user 
friendlyness as GNUstep (that is my opinion atleast). I jumped from the GNOME 
bandwagon because of the future of GNUstep.

Please don't loose confidence because of a lack of attention. It will come. I 
did a lecture last year here in Holland and expected a couple of people and 
ended up with a room full. And after that people came to me to ask how soon we 
could finish the job. There is a market!
(I must admit that for most people who where willing to help out, the Objective 
C part was the biggest problem, followed by the integration of CORBA)


> ii) We alter our plans and visions and try to integrate GNUstep into another 
> desktop (GNOME)

Hope not...


> What do you think? Is this complete rubbish, should I get more sleep or ....?

Atleast more sleep, when I look at your productivity ;)

I think there are some good points in the integration part, but I feel if we 
want to integrate we should first get to 1.0, then see what happens. After that 
who knows, but I still feel we can get some market share with GNUstep. I think 
people are smart enough.

Greetings,


Dennis Leeuw

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