Hi,
Yavor Doganov wrote:
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.
I remember those times ... I think Miguel never fully grasped the power
and simplicity of the OpenStep approach (which then wasn't yet
"history", it was quite contemporary).
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.
Indeed, GNOME went a route of a lot of "Industry standard" stuff. I
remember .NET being pushed a lot as the next free thing, I remember
talks at my University with people of FSF. Microsoft has changed, it is
open, cool.... then a lot of these ideas where floating around, CORBA
was there.
.NET actually went public in the early 2000s, but clearly it was already
influencing things (and was by itself influenced). I was taught that
Java's RMI was primitive and the next thing would be CORBA... objects
everywhere. Now we know what happened really.
DO's are clean and elegant and actually work...
I don't know if it was the right decision at that time, but for sure it
was going from the frying pan to the fire.
GNOME then caught a lot of momentum, like when it was chosen by Sun for
Solaris.
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.
Yes, he betrayed FOSS since the start!
I don't feel mono is doing that great and it looks to me a little bit
like the "open part" of some proprietary project... a bit like the
half-assed OpenSource things by Sun/Oracle and Apple, just a little bit
better because it is used more.
A lot of people don't like where GNOME is going especially after 3.x
(now with the absurd new numbering scheme to look cool like Firefox or
Chrome).
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.
I remember well.. nobody chimed in.
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.
I also believe that and it is continuing, we had quite some
improvements. Except for some negative flux that happens on hot
discussions, I think we have a positive time. "Slow but steady". Of
course, new issues rise again from time to time as the rest of the world
changes. Hard.
I like your evangelist citation, but I can also more think of
Highlander. we will survive them all :)
Riccardo
