The web is not a US colony it is a meritocracy. In this case the US has most of the services which are essential for NOW. But this may not always be the case. So, Sweden and other countries that are upset should start working on the technological things that might give them the edge in the future.
In this world it is now all about the information and the technology. There is no fair and balanced here. Whoever knows the most... wins.
GC
There's ARC in Objective-C for example, which is a huge difference. Not sure if that's implemented in GNUstep.
Yes, it's implemented. If you're using CLANG. GNUstep's libobjc2 runtime supports it fully. GCC, unfortunately, has a long way to go to catch up on some features since, for some reason, they don't consider ObjC to be release critical.
GNUstep is a lovely (and lovable) project, but "bring the implementation to API compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6's Cocoa"? Really? 10.6, when 10.9 is just around the corner? With such a huge delay, GNUstep will never be able to take off.
You expect me to be able to bring the API all the way from 10.4/5 to 10.8/9 in six months? Some are saying that 10.6 is a lofty goal, but I think it's more realistic than 10.8 or 10.9. Also, if I see opportunities to bring things up to 10.8/9 while I'm doing it, I will. It's a matter of setting a believable goal to achieve.
I'll take a quick stab at answering your question.
They're not trying to duplicate Mac OS X. The project started before that, to clone nextstep, or the api's at least, which were at one point being billed as a cross platform framework called openstep.
I assume these guys liked Objective-C(which came from nextstep) and liked openstep and you know then the whole thing took on a life of its own.
Now they could stick with the state of openstep when NeXT shutdown, or they could go off on thier own, or they could bring in the new stuff from Mac OS X(which is descended from nextstep).
They seem to want to the last one.
We've done the last one for many years now. The issue is that there are very few of us and none of us have the time to work on it full time. What I propose to do is take some time to purely work on GNUstep so that I can bring it up to a standard that everyone can live with and build on.
If by 'continually in the Top 5' you mean 'already second year in a row in Top 5', then I can agree. But I think that compared to other top-10 languages, 'just very recently became of any importance at all' would be more honest statement.
Well, first it's a couple years, then it's a third and a fourth, then it's 20.
Isn't GNUSTEP, like OpenStep, a platform independent standard? If yes, then it would work on both GNU as well as non-GNU platforms, such as the BSDs. Also, how important is the GNU userland here - is it either an important part of GNUSTEP, or necessary for GNUSTEP to even work/run? If not, then leaving out GNU out of Linux doesn't mean much, since GNUSTEP could run on it, w/o things like glibc, x11 and so on.
GNUstep is completely platform independent. The only thing it requires is a POSIX layer for some of the low level functions (which is available on Windows in the form of MinGW). It abstracts the display and the events layers. GNUstep has implementations for X11 and for Windows and can have implementations for any windowing system you prefer.
The reason for the GNU in GNUstep is largely historical. Originally, GNUstep was supposed to be *the* development environment and windowing system for HURD and for Linux, but it didn't work out that way since KDE and GNOME came to prominence. GNUstep, since it followed OpenStep at the time and now follows Cocoa, had to be implemented against an existing spec as opposed to the "blow up the world and start everything new" philosophy of the other two projects. Implementing against an existing spec is much harder because it requires more discipline. Additionally, GNUstep is written using ObjC (for obvious reasons) and, back then, it wasn't as popular as it is now and developers interest both in ObjC and in coding for GNUstep were rare.
NOTE: Some of the rewards say Linux instead of GNU/Linux. Apologies for the omission.
Sorry, I dont support projects with pedantic zelots leading them. There is "Linux" and the Linux kernel, "Linux" is a fine an appropriate generic term for the operating system as a whole. Otherwise you really should be saying stupid shit like: "Ubuntu/Debian/GNU/Linux" to be clear because GNU is just a toolchain and a collection of software but not the whole collection.
Get. Over. It.
The fact is that Debian calls the distro "Debian GNU/Linux" whether you or I agree with the philosophy behind it, that's their proper name. If you take this as a sign of zealotry from me, which it is not I was only trying to call them what they choose to be called, then you're being a zealot in the opposite direction and perhaps you need to "Get. Over. It."
Fine, no manned *GOVERNMENT* mission... If the government isn't going to do it could they, at least, get out of the way and give the approvals so that private industry CAN do it?
Sheesh...
GC
Miguel,
Given that you have decided to do the right thing and join the ranks of the Mac faithful, I, as GNUstep's Chief Maintainer, I would like to extend a formal invitation to re-join the GNUstep project.
Sincerely Yours,
Gregory Casamento
P.S. Kidding.
From brutal experience I can attest to the fact that most people on Slashdot, save myself, are not that smart.
GC
A few things:
1) the yarchive.net article makes assertions about how some of the advantages "have no basis in fact" but provides no proof. So this article fails miserably as any sort of counterexample. Additionally, it's from 1998... hardware is much more powerful now.
2) The real world tech article by Linus is interesting, but I'm not sure I would consider Linus unbiased in this case.
Choose your counterexamples better, my friend.
GC
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
I understood your argument up to this point, but then you had to resort to a "he didn't add this to minix until 20 years after it was started, so he must suck" argument which, in spite of it being dressed up in technical language is another "argument against the man" (i.e. Ad Hominem) attack against someone who has spoke out against Linux.
It's easy to find fault in the person making the argument. What's harder is to argue the actual point. Part of the issue with microkernels is that, yes, they are, typically, quite slow... but that's not what I was referring to. More specifically I was referring to the translators which run in userspace on HURD. This is a powerful capability which Linux doesn't have. It illustrates a fundamental element of design which is something that HURD can leverage in the future.
Personally, if it's all about technical superiority, I think we should all be using Plan9 OS.... but that's just me.
But you also have to remember.... the machines they were judging Mach and other microkernels on at the time were not very powerful. Today's machines are orders of magnitude faster. I believe that such an architecture would have no problems on todays hardware.
GC
Some guy from GNUStep is calling Slashdot irrelevant? Glass houses, my good sir.
Wow... Ad Hominem much? And if you don't know what that means, perhaps you should dig out a latin textbook someplace and learn something.
But you see, you've proven my point here. You reject GNUstep because it's not GNOME or C++ or something else you're used to. You reject it just because it's the thing to do. Because the herd does it. You do this to HURD in the same manner.
What I'm asking the community to do is to take a step back from all of this sycophantic bullsh*t and take a critical look at itself. What good has this exclusionary attitude had for the open source community? None. The only good it has done is to force many, potentially good, projects into non-existence.
GC
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
