Re: Questions

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 6 Mar 2016, at 09:51, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dr. Schaller,
> 
> On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 4:09 AM, H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@computer.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am still interested to find out about the goals (or if there are any) of 
> this project
> by following such discussions. And to be able to decide if I should start to 
> invest
> more time for this project or even less.
> 
> ​I think the "mission statement" needs to be clear, but I believe it's enough 
> to say that this project started out as an effort to bring OpenStep to a 
> myriad of platforms.  Now that OpenStep has evolved into Cocoa I believe 
> GNUstep's mission is extended to one of bringing the ease of Cocoa 
> development to as many platforms as possible.   This mission includes the 
> idea of a "porting environment" if we were only that we would not have 
> ProjectCenter and Gorm.
> 
> I have been discussing with Ivan the idea of a "reference platform" for 
> GNUstep.  That is to say a platform which is tuned to give the user the best 
> possible experience with the framework.  Think along the lines of 
> NeXTSTEP/Mach or OPENSTEP/Mach vs. OpenStep for Solaris or OpenStep 
> Enterprise for Windows (OSE).
> 
> It's not as complex as some are trying to make it.​ 

Indeed, looking to the discussion list as a place to find project goals strikes 
me as strange; you find the above statement, more or less, on wikipedia and on 
the GNUstep website ... which is where I would expect to find such things.

I do think perhaps the public statements may be confusing to some people 
because we are leaving base assumptions out though; we don't notice them 
because they are so fundamental that it never occurs to us that someone else 
may not be aware of them.

At its heard GNUstep is a free software project, and that carries some baggage 
in the kind of people it tends to attract; people who believe in freedom, 
openness, helping others etc, and who gain some satisfaction from pursuing 
those underlying principles.  These are people who are not generally trying to 
leverage the project to their own personal advantage.

We don't generally say that the discussion list is free and open;  because we 
assume it.  So it's surprising that someone can come along and suggest 
otherwise; perhaps because we *haven't* specifically said it.
We don't say that we help and advise people doing software development, because 
we assume that behaviour and just do it as best we can, so we don't expect 
other people to think we are looking for our own advantage.

Probably we should be publicising what the free software ethos is, rather than 
assuming that people are familiar with it.  After all there's an awful lot of 
publicity out there focussing on personalities and individual errors and 
obscuring the fundamentals, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised if people 
forget the basics principles.