Re: A few questions

[David Chisnall]

On 26 Oct 2009, at 20:00, Zack - wrote:

> 1. Why is the glassy Mac-like theme not the default?
>   The look and feel of the Mac is pretty popular
>   even outside the Mac-owning community, and
>   by making the glassy appearance the default you
>   could expand the number of GNUstep enthusiasts.

Apple owns the Mac look and feel.  Creating a theme based on this  
would be a derived work and Apple has, in the past, shown absolutely  
no hesitation in the past in suing people who produce Aqua themes for  
other systems.

We, in general, prefer to spend our time coding, rather than sitting  
in court arguing with Apple lawyers.

> 2. As you may know, Hackintosh PCs, i.e. x86 PCs on
>   which OS X has been installed, are increasingly popular
>   due to the development of the Boot-132 installation disk,
>   which allows installing from an unmodified retail OS X DVD.
>   The Hackintosh idea has even recently been mentioned
>   in the mainstream media. Given this popularity, why not
>   form an alliance with the Hackintosh crowd to promote
>   GNUstep as an alternative to putting actual OS X
>   on PCs, which due to driver problems is often not
>   completely possible?

GNUstep is not a replacement for OS X.  GNUstep is a replacement for  
Cocoa, which is one part of OS X.  The hackintosh community is in  
violation of Apple's EULA which may or may not be valid in your  
jurisdiction.

Generally, people who want to do this are interested in running OS X  
and proprietary OS X programs.  GNUstep would not help here.  If  
people are interested in running GNUstep applications then this is an  
option already, with any *NIX distribution.

I am not sure what we would gain by affiliating ourselves with a group  
that has shown that it would rather use proprietary software and  
disregard the license conditions associated with this software than  
use Free Software.

David

-- Sent from my Cray X1