John,
I grappled with the same question when I originally got involved with
GNUstep back in the mid-90's. The answer to the question is clearly
yes. If you were to look at the original OpenStep specification, you
will see that it has NeXT's copyright on it with no mention of a
license, which means that all rights are reserved. I had contacted
NeXT back in those days about a license for GNUstep development, but
they declined to respond. They were more interested in companies who
could infuse them with large chunks of cash, like Sun did when
OpenStep was briefly available for Solaris. To make matters worse,
Apple has patented any number of technologies in use in OpenStep; the
target-action paradigm is one example.
Considering all this negativity, one might wonder why Apple hasn't
shut GNUstep down yet. There are plenty of speculative answers:
* No significant commercial entity to sue.
* Apple has to show financial damages and hardship; Apple stock and
revenues don't seem to be impacted much by GNUstep.
* Apple is "friendly" towards open source groups.
My personal opinion is that Apple does not consider GNUstep a threat.
The implementation is incomplete and lacks the final polish of OS X,
plus there aren't droves of OS X software companies porting their
software. If many years down the road, GNUstep does become a
considerable commercial force and Apple's fortunes have waned; then it
is perfectly reasonable that they could "pull a sco". Then again, if
some commercial company does make it big with GNUstep, the best favor
they could do is buy off Apple and secure GNUstep's future.
cheers
Scott
On Sunday, August 24, 2003, at 08:13 PM, John Anderson wrote:
So, I am sorry to have to ask this question but given the SCO /
Linux debacle, it is repeatedly common up in my head. I know that
there are lot of good people working very hard on GNUstep, so please
do not get pissed off. It is just that this question is not
addressed on the GNUstep website, but rather prompted by it.
Furthermore, I am relatively new to programming professionally and I
have been unable to find any detailed information on what exactly
went down between Apple and Yellowbox.
To the extent that my future is increasing being tied to Cocoa/OS X,
I need to evaluate my other options. I am asking myself, what is my
"Plan B." For example, I might decide to invest a lot of time and
money into "porting" my Cocoa applications to GNUstep to run them on
IBM Power5/6 systems. Am I going to have to worry that Apple has
solid legal ground to kill GNUstep at will? Or does GNUstep have
some kind of a license from Apple? I mean, it appears clear to me
that GNUstep is a derivative work that must violate Apple's
copyrights on OpenStep and Cocoa.
Truly yours,
John Anderson
Detroit.
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