Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Graham Lee]

On 12 Sep 2013, at 09:20, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:

I believe that 'compatibility with OS X 10.x' as a goal is fundamentally flawed, for three reasons:

Hi David,

I'd like to add this reason:

4. Not many high-profile Cocoa/Cocoa Touch devs actually _care_ about write-once-build-everywhere. They think that the Mac (or iPhone or iPad) is the best thing ever, and therefore aren't going to release Windows (or Android) versions of their apps even if it were zero cost, zero effort. That means that if GNUstep's target audience is Apple platform devs, it's really not going to get much of a profile.

Now I'm not saying that Apple platforms devs _are_ the target, you (and particularly Greg as Chief Maintainer) may have other goals in mind. But if they are, then I'd suggest that there are ways to improve the project's standing amongst them that aren't providing API compatibility with Mac OS X. The reason I've been (slowly) working on some GNUstep Web projects, for example, is to be able to say "you can do your server backend code using the skills you've already acquired while writing your apps". That position would make GNUstep a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Mac OS X or iOS—it puts it in the same category as something like objective-cloud.com. We're still low visibility there, but if you search for "objective-c server" then you (or at least I) get a bunch of my blog posts and Nicola's FOSDEM talk which we could promote more :-). That talk's here: http://www.slideshare.net/guest9efd1a1/building-server-applications-using-objectivec-and-gnustep and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnZMpGiL6s

As ever if I've completely missed the point then please correct me.

Thanks,

Graham.