Yavor, Thank you. Your quote of Matthew 20:16 is always how I have felt about GNUstep. As long as someone is pushing it forward and as long as we have people who love it we stand a chance. I am not religious (in fact I'm an atheist) but I was brought up Roman Catholic.
Yours, GC On Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 4:28 PM Yavor Doganov <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > > > -- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Developer / Black Lotus, Principal Consultant http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=352392 - Become a Patron https://www.openhub.net/languages/objective_c https://www.gofundme.com/f/cacao-linux-a-gnustep-reference-implementation
