Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[Nicola Pero]

> > One thing that amazed me is that people don't seem to care about the 
> > fact that your
> > beloved Cocoa (or OSX for that matters) could very well be thrown by 
> > Apple (or
> > simply, Apple could just go out of business).
> 
> Apple's primary API for Mac OS X going forward is Cocoa.  They're not 
> going to throw it out.  Every new Mac OS X application coming out of 
> Apple is built using Cocoa.

Yes - you are right, I don't see any short-term risk in Cocoa.

But you're still relying on someone else's business to be able to run
yours.  They have the basic frameworks on top of which your application is
built, and they're keeping control of them, so you're depending on them
making those available to you and your customers for you to stay in
business.

As a comparison, every new NeXTstep application coming out of NeXT used to
be built using NeXTstep, and it could have been considered free of risk to
build using NeXTstep.  But it wasn't - the platform disappeared from the
market and any business building on it was in deep trouble.

I agree it's not going to happen with Apple any time soon, Apple is in a
better position than NeXT was, and you can consider the risk very low.  
You're right. :-)

Still, in the back of my mind, having heard/seen so many disappointed
NeXTsteppers, I think there is some truth in Nicolas' argument.  I do feel
reassured when I think that no matter what the rest of the world does,
I've got full source code of GNUstep, and I can always build/port/fix it
if I need it to run my software.  Nobody can take GNUstep away from me.