Re: of applications for gnustep...

[Marco Scheurer]

On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 02:53 PM, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> After reading the past postings and the LightHouse petitions, I thought
> about this:
>
> We could need a light-weigth browser, with a nice interface.
>
> I think we could make a petition to sen:te for SpiderWoman and port it 
> to
> GStep and maybe mock it up. I wrote personally two times and never had 
> an
> answer, but maybe a petition would hel. AFAIK binaries were freely
> downloadable.

I'm sorry if we ignored you. The code from Spiderwoman is very old (~ 
1995), very ugly, and I'm not even sure I can locate a work area for 
the latest stable version. Worse, it's not in our current CVS 
repository and I'm starting to wonder if it was under cvs at all. I'll 
ask and look around. If I can find it, there's no need for a petition, 
we will gladly give the code to GNUstep (if it is still wanted of 
course).

A bit of history if you're interested...

At one time NeXTSTEP had 4 browsers: WorldWideWeb (the very first 
browser, from Tim Berners lee at CERN) Omniweb, Netsurfer and 
SpiderWoman, and the rest of the world was mostly using Mosaic from 
Mosaic Inc (to become Netscape) or another variation of NCSA's Mosaic.

An editor of NEXTSTEP software told us they were interested in making a 
commercial version of SpiderWoman. Everything was agreed upon, even the 
fact that a free SpiderWoman would still be available, with less 
features. The deal was off when NeXT told this editor that it was a bad 
idea to try to sell a browser because one would be bundled with 
NeXTSTEP soon (it never happened).

At the same time, Mosaic started to add custom "improvements" to HTML, 
like <blink> and friends, and it started to be difficult for us to 
spend enough time working on this free browser. We decided we would 
give the source, but (big mistake) not before a little clean-up. Of 
course it never happened, and the value of this code is now close to 
zero, I believe.

Note that we learned from our mistake, and for instance released the 
code for CVL, the UI to cvs, even when it contains code we're not proud 
of.

Marco Scheurer
Sen:te, Lausanne, Switzerland    http://www.sente.ch