On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 00:21, stacy stacy wrote: > i've always thought that the downside to open source OS' is > that things are extended and modified but the guts of the > programming usually remains the same... > > i mean the concept of X has not really had any other competition > has it? Well, actually :)
The X Windowing System Version 10 (X10) ran head to head against a rival windowing system called NeWS, produced by Sun. NeWS was PostScript based (*real* WYSIWYG), had a highly consistent widget set, and was a lot easier to use that X. For no fault of its own NeWS lost to X10, Sun eventually moved over to X, and eventually shipped CDE as its default desktop. The NeWS people didn't give up. They moved over to a startup founded by the newly unemployed Steve Jobs and created the NeXT system. By all accounts the NeXT system was a beautiful box that had a number of significant and original features: Simple hardware (68K based), good programing environment (Objective-C), industry standard OS (BSD running on a Mach microkernel), and a GUI that blew everything else out of the water. I recall a interview with John Carmack [sp?] who said the the NeXT is still the best programing environment that he has ever used (Doom was written in Objective-C on a NeXT box). NeXT had a *profound* influence on how things are done under X. WindowMaker/BlackBox/Afterstep are all clones of the NeXT window manager, both GKT+ and QT ship NeXT themes, and the entire GnuSTEP project [1] is trying to recreate the NeXTSTEP system using GhostScript as the screen renderer, rather than an official PostScrip interpreter. I'd even argue that things like the "main menu" (the Foot menu in GNOME, KDE menu, and Start Menu in Windows) are little NeXTisms. Eventually NeXT took over Apple in a weird reverse takeover: Apple brought NeXT and found itself adopting the NeXT system hook, line and sinker. Aqua is the newest version of NeXTSTEP, using PDF instead of PostScript as the rendering language. Open Source has not rested on its laurels. While most people use X11, there are other systems out there. GnuSTEP, mentioned earlier, recreates the NeXT API, while Berlin [2] (a cousin-project to Debian) is trying to create an entirely new windowing system using CORBA as the communication layer. [1] http://www.gnustep.org/ [2] http://www.berlin-consortium.org/ -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~mpj17/
