Re: ANN: One Step to GNUstep - pre-release version 0.9

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

thanks again for turning the announcement of a postive effort for 
GNUstep into a personal philosophic crusade where we always restate the 
same things. Do you really think this helps GNUstep? Our image? And 
overall, the morale of the current developers?
> This also emphasizes one other thing I've been saying repeatedly and
> that is that small differences (i.e. lack of certain features)
> presents a huge issue when it comes to getting new users and
> developers. The features added to ObjC 2.0 in LLVM/clang are not
> "small features", since lack of these features represent a serious
> impediment to new developers who would like to either write new
> applications or port existing applications from Mac OS X.
>    
Those features are not essential: you can program without them. They do 
not represent a serious impediment for new applications. They represent 
a hurdle only for the Mac crowd coming with their expectations.

And to get back on track where Nicola left: sure, a lot of mac people 
*could* come over, but few of them will develop into free and open 
source enthusiasts. Most of them will look at GNUstep in a way to expand 
their user base.
Granted, we are free, so I am happy if a Mac developer wants to use my 
stuff! Even for commercial stuff! That's the power of free software. 
However these are not the only user and developers who we can twinkle to.

> Losing this potential new blood is something that cannot be allowed to
> continue on this project.
>    
Wow! Right! Exact! But we do not only get visits from Mac developers but 
also from people genuinely interested in an alternative framework and/or 
environment. Several dropped into the IRC channel and several into the 
Mailing list.
Several were turned away by the access to GNUstep, those who were able 
to run it, by the incompleteness and lack of maintenance of our 
applications. But that is new blood too. Do you think it is not "blue" 
as the royal blood from Apple? Maybe not, but perhaps it is more FOSS 
oriented!

The packages done by Richard for SuSE should help anybody in their first 
steps and the VM setup attract even lazier people :) It is also a show 
off how things can work (in the good or the bad) in a reference setup.
Just through the making on it Richard helped pinpoint a quite large 
number of bugs, from the make systems to libraries and apps! This is 
precious.

Wonderful rewarding GNUstep community.

I'll just say thank you again to Richard.

Riccardo