Liam Proven wrote: > On 25/07/2024 2:37 pm, Gregory Casamento wrote: > > The FSF planned on using GNUstep as it's MAIN development and > > desktop environment, but when GNOME was introduced it stole our > > thunder. :) Long story which I won't get into here... but Miguel De > > Icaza was once a member of GS. I'll leave it there. > > Remarkable! Really? When?
In the 90's. Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena-Quintero volunteered for the GNU project, specifically for desktop develepment. They were directed to the GNUstep project, which at that time was chosen by rms to be the basis of a future GNU desktop. After a few months of work (I'm not sure their commits are still publicly available somewhere, the repository back then was private and Adam Fedor, former GNUstep project leader and also FSF secretary, made some of them on their behalf, IIRC) they persuaded rms that GNUstep is a dead end and it will take an eternity to produce a desktop, so they revealed their plans for a new desktop environment based on GIMP's toolkit which would become GTK. Miguel managed to persuade rms that it's better to start from scratch and build our own (GNU) toolkit that was not based on Sun's and/or Apple's technologies. rms found the idea compelling, furthermore the FSF (a relevantly young oranization then) was unproven in court battles. This was a right decision at that time. I find it ironic that early GNOME architecture copied (reimplemented) so much stuff from Microsoft (all of bonobo, a CORBA replacement, and not only that). I'm sure rms knew nothing about these technical details, he believed Miguel and Federico were designing something unuque. I don't know how Miguel's Mono project is going. These are the buggiest packages in Debian, so I guess not so well. rms openly calls him a "traitor" (he really is) and regrets that he's given him so much trust. He also doesn't like the direction GNOME is heading to. rms still has a soft spot for GNUstep. Some of the readers of this list may remember that for a number of years there was a plea on gnu.org's homepage that the GNUstep project needs developers and testers. I initiated this and rms immediately agreed; unfortunately it didn't have any positive effect. rms also believes (as do I) that the GNUstep project has immense potential and as long as there are people envolved in its development, and people tinkering, something great may come of it. It is possible that the Last may become First and the First become Last, as written once by a guy known as Matthew.
