Quoting Orlando Andico ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > I've heard about Berlin and GGI on and off for YEARS. The fact they're > still moribund says plenty about how good X is.
A lot of software projects look moribund for a long time, if you don't know where to look. (Of course, in some cases, it's because they _are_ moribund, but I have a point to make about those that aren't.) Ambitious projects like OSes and network-oriented graphics subsystems require a lot of fundamental groundwork before any flamboyant results are even possible: First, the development tools and libraries must be written, then the necessary support utilities, and only in the latter stages does anything even get _started_ that seems useful to end-users. This has an effect on the pace of development, too: In open-source projects particularly, since developers are human and would rather do work that will reach payoff sooner rather than later, they seldom contribute to projects in the early tools-and-libraries stage. So, such projects tend to be sparsely staffed and show no attention-getting results for most of their history, and then suddenly attract people and move rapidly. (One of the reasons Stallman and the FSF people get touchy about credit to the GNU Project is that they worked in obscurity on the difficult and crucial components for years, and then latecomers borrowed their hard work to make the final pieces that got all the applause.) > It's one thing to bellyache about X, but no one (at least until Aqua) has > been able to come up with a decent alternative -- of course there's the > Sun NeWS, which had DPS support too. And died. NeWS was tightly Sun-controlled and very proprietary, and thus far less acceptable from the viewpoint of industry politics than the X Window System, which was a half-assed, perpetually unfinished MIT project but liberally licensed and politics-neutral. Which brings us back to GNUstep and OpenStep: _Unlike_ the case with Berlin and GGI, the GNUstep people aren't designing and building something ridiculously ambitious from scratch. In a move that he probably now regrets, Steve Jobs helped create OpenStep as a complete, detailed specification for how to write tools, libraries, and graphics subsystems compatible with those that ran on NeXTStep. He even, with considerable ill grace (and largely on account of licence requirements) contributed Objective C support to gcc. So, the GNUstep Project started out with a proven design, a complete spec, and some necessary tools already completed. It's possible that GNUstep never comes to fruition for some reason, maybe because something better comes along, or for worse reasons. It's also possible that it'll never fully obsolete X11. But it's nice to know the developers are out there, trying. -- Cheers, There are only 10 types of people in this world -- Rick Moen those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
