But, as project maintainer, I'm sure you can appreciate my
position. I can't say unilaterally that I want to appeal to one
group over the other.
GNUstep currently most appeals to former NeXT people who are into
Mac OS X. However, a lot of these people also say that it's time
for GNUstep to move forward with it's GUI look. A friend of mine
owns a software company that was once fairly well known in the NeXT
world and he's said the same thing.
I do appreciate your position. I also appreciate that it is your call
to make!
However, even if some (or a lot of) people are saying that GnuStep
must change its look and "move forward", that does not make it either
the right technical decision or the right business decision. You put
it well in another thread yourself:
Because everyone else is doing it certainly is NOT a compelling
reason. I prefer to think for myself.
Furthermore it does not mean that changing the appearance of GNUstep
will result in more people using GNUstep. Where is your business case
for that - what evidence do you have that this will happen?
Changing the GUI will not come for free - there is the cost of work
involved in implementing it and the much greater still cost of
increased future work and complexity involved in maintaining several
different looks and feels. Indeed, I'm willing to bet that not all
themes will be properly maintained, that possibly none of them will
be properly maintained, and that this will lead to many tedious my-
app-doesn't-look-right-in-xyzzy-theme bugs that will take forever to
fix.
There are also risks involved - you're more likely than not to make a
dog's breakfast of it. The people who designed the NeXT look and feel
were very good, and nobody has yet succeeded in bettering them. Apple
tried, and failed spectacularly. "Modern" is not always better, and
"moving forward" does not necessarily mean "improving". If you get it
wrong, you'll end up not only not attracting new developers, you're
also likely to drive away your core NeXT afficionados.
Worse still, you might get it "right" and attract lots of low quality
developers of the sort who cannot see beyond screenshots and skins,
who will fail to understand GNUstep in the same way that Apple
engineers have failed to understand OpenStep. More developers is not
always better for the platform - there is no platform in the world
with more developers developing for it than Windows; NeXT had 500
people working for them at their peak - who had the better software?
Apple has 10,000 people - did they improve OpenStep, or make a dog's
breakfast of it? What you want to attract is more *quality*
developers. Trying to change the look and feel to attract the sort of
developers who make their decisions as to whether to adopt a platform
or not primarily on the basis of the look of its widgets and on
screen shots is taking you into the domain of Apple-land, in my opinion.
These costs and risks do not mean you shouldn't go ahead with changes
- but they do mean you need a pretty compelling business case that
there are good reasons to believe (not just "some people think/say")
that there is real potential substantial return to be had by pursuing
this course. Who will switch to using GnuStep/developing for GnuStep
because you've "modernized" its theme? What evidence do you (and
others who claim that) have they will?
Mark Grice wrote:
And, I still read that some people can't manage to get it
installed. This is a real problem.
Renauld Molla wrote:
When you say that people interested about GNUstep won't care about
a new UI, this is definitely wrong. ... a friend of mine ... needed
an interface ... I advocated GNUstep ... why wasn't it retained?
Because for him, GNUstep is too hard to install ... and it looks
terrible. And this guy is no newbie. And there are loads of them.
Both people make precisely the right point although Renauld, in my
view, mentions two problems and focuses on the wrong one. The reason
GNUstep is not taking off, has nothing to do with its look and feel.
Its look and feel is spectacularly good - why try to look more like
everyone else when you already look better than them? You'll end up
like Apple who has been trying to look more like Windows (very
successfully) and has been getting worse and worse for it. There is
no room for another Wintel/Apple clone in the market - look the same
and it means certain death, look unique and different, and you might
just find your niche.
The reason, in my opinion, that GNUstep is not taking off is
blindingly obvious and much more mundane: the damn thing is
IMPOSSIBLE to install. Who's going to use it if they can't install
it? If you want to win the lottery, rather than worry what's wrong
with you and "fix" what is already perfect, why don't you try buying
a ticket?
Perhaps not on Linux, but on an Apple installing GnuStep is
impossible. Why isn't there a .dmg installer somewhere with a .mpkg
in it which just installs the thing on a Mac? Such a thing should
contain all the development tools (gnu c with Gnu runtime, and all
GnuStep software etc.), should run on any Mac OS X (10.3, 10.4, 10.5)
and be fully multi-architecture (ppc,i386,x86_64 at a minimum). I
just spent nearly 2 weeks trying to build GnuStep from scratch,
hoping to produce such a .dmg, put it on my web site and offer it to
you. I had to give up! I did not want to use DarwinPorts initially
(for various reasons) but my only conclusion from that experience is
that building the whole thing from scratch is just not a viable
proposition. I'd built up all the prerequisites 5-way fat (ppc/
ppc7450/ppc64/i386/x86_64) only to realize that if I want to build
GnuStep itself 5-way fat, I have to build 5 different versions of GCC
and build everything else again with Gnu runtime ... and then rebuild
GnuStep again. It's several more weeks' worth of work!
Eventually I got so exasperated trying to do it myself that I
conceded defeat and tried the DarwinPorts route - on a brand new,
cleanly installed machine, with just a /usr/local and an /
Applications/Local added. First thing, DarwinPorts failed to install
at all because it didn't like something in my /usr/local. Sigh, OK,
so I archived /usr/local into a .dmg and removed it, just so I could
try GNUstep. Try again! But even with a completely clean machine,
DarwinPorts failed, like this:
---> Extracting gnustep-base
---> Configuring gnustep-base
Error: Target org.macports.configure returned: configure failure:
shell command " cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/
_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_gnust
ep_gnustep-base/work/gnustep-base-1.14.0" && ./configure --prefix=/
opt/local CC=gcc-mp-4.2 GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES=/opt/local/share/GNUstep/
Makefiles " returned error 1
Command output: configure: error: cannot find install-sh or
install.sh in /opt/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles "."//opt/local/
share/GNUstep/Makefiles
Error: The following dependencies failed to build: ArtResources
gnustep-core gnustep-back gnustep-gui gnustep-base gnutls libgcrypt
libgpg-error gettext libtasn1 lzo opencdk readline ncurses ncursesw
libpng libungif tiff jpeg libart_lgpl GMastermind GMines GNUMail
Etoile SQLClient Performance sqlite3 gawk dbus docbook-xml-4.1.2
xmlcatmgr xmlto docbook-xml-4.2 docbook-xsl getopt oniguruma5
poppler cairo gtk2 atk glib2 pango poppler-data Pantomime PRICE
TalkSoup netclasses Yap.app ImageMagick bzip2 a2ps psutils
gworkspace system-preferences PreferencePanes windowmaker
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.
You know, I am awfully motivated to use GNUstep but having to fight
this hard just to install is too much!
Rather than focussing your efforts on changing the GUI with risk and
no certainty of return, would you not be better off on focussing your
energy into producing a nice self-contained .mpkg to install it
easily on a Mac, and keep those updated? I think you would be MUCH
better off. Do this, give it a bit of time and give the current look
another chance - see if it catches on once people are actually given
a chance to try GnuStep out.
You can do this with absolutely no risk of alienating anybody,
probably with not too much work, and you are virtually guaranteed to
win more users and more developers. Is this not a better business
proposition than changing the theme?
This brings me on to the next question: who are you targeting? *You
cannot appeal to everybody*. You try to appeal to everybody, and you
will end up appealing to nobody. You have to pick your target
audience. Is it Linux/KDE/Gnome developers or former NeXT/current Mac
OS X developers? It looks to me like you're de facto targeting the
former (all comparisons are with KDE/Gnome, all effort is going into
having GnuStep bundled with Linux; but on a Mac, there isn't even a
simple way to install the system).
I think this is a big mistake. There is a much greater barrier to
entry coming from the KDE/Gnome world, and much more effort will be
required to develop new applications from scratch. A much better goal
for you is to persuade existing Cocoa/Apple developers (and mostly
former NeXT developers, many of whom are now doing just that -
developing for Cocoa) to port their apps to GnuStep. And to attract
ANY of those, you absolutely MUST have a simple installer for GnuStep
on Mac OS X. Moreover, trying to go after Linux developers has
another disadvantage - those developers are less likely to understand
what OpenStep is all about and are more likely to push it in the
wrong direction. You can pander to their every demand, and GnuStep
will never be good enough - until it's the same as KDE/Gnome.
Mark Grice wrote:
If someone wants to keep the old style NEXTStep look and feel THAT
should be a branch. The main code has to move forward in this area
or no one will take GNUStep seriously.
I disagree. People look at substance, not form. We use computers to
work. We ask: what can it do for me, not: does it look nice? I hate
Apple's Aqua gummy, but that doesn't make me want to quit Apple.
Apple's flakiness and lack of functionality does.
I think, on the contrary, it is GNUstep that should not take
seriously people who decide against using GNUstep on the basis of its
icons, and skins. Such developers are the sort who have made the mess
of OpenStep at Apple; the value they will add to the project is
negative.
In this spirit, rather than focus on the skin, what about some of my
other suggestions:
Strengths of GnuStep you can leverage:
a) Objective C/OpenStep frameworks on non-Apple hardware (cheaper,
more robust/reliable than Apple);
b) open source (could be important to users not wanting to be tied
to a proprietary solution);
Forget - to start with - *everyone* wanting to use GnuStep, if they
want to. You need a niche that you cater for - to which you offer
something nobody else can, or, at least, to offer it 10x better
than anyone else.
Niches you could potentially appeal to:
1) former NeXT users
2) technical / mathematical users (as NeXTStep)
3) Apple is not terribly solid and reliable. If you can be more
solid/reliable, you could potentially target users from the
"mission critical" market - like financial institutions.
Here are some suggestions:
#1: (i) more development frameworks. (ii) Reliable/bullet-proof/
debugged frameworks. (iii) Faster/optimized frameworks.
#2: applications. How about:
- to appeal to mathematical/technical market:
- a GnuStep clone of Mathematica notebook interface / do a
deal with Wolfram to develop one for GnuStep;
- GnuStepTeX
- ? etc. ?
- to appeal to the mission critical / finance market:
- an Objective C framework for derivatives pricing
- a Lotus Improv/Quantrix clone
- ? etc. ?
- educational software - to target schools
#3: how about producing an install DVD which formats a PC's disk
and automatically installs a GnuStep/Linux distribution?
Or doing a deal with a PC manufacturer to sell - or for you to
sell - cheap PCs with GnuStep/Linux preinstalled?
Or doing a package deal to sell PCs with GnuStep/Linux pre-
installed cheaply to schools? Can you get a computer company to
donate equipment to schools and the GnuStep team installs the OS
and the GUI?
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