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Re: Advertisement for gnustep


From: Yavor Doganov
Subject: Re: Advertisement for gnustep
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:19:25 +0200

Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf wrote:

This is ideological thinking.

Free software is extremely ideological, political and social by nature. The ultimate goal of the GNU Project is to change the society.

But if you want to achieve an objective in practice you'll have to think practically and do practically things, like give something to get something (which is also an very good social behaviour).

We are pragmatic idealists, I'm sure you know that ;-)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

And it's the best if the "something" is actually something somebody needs and gets a benefit from. That "something" most Cocoa developers - e.g. the people that actually *use* some kind of OpenStep today - need would be some possibility to port their software to Windows. If we could offer that seamlessly we would gain a huge interest in that community without the need to convince people to use OpenStep in the first hand.

What will the benefit for the citizens of the Free World for that (apart from the patches that these Cocoa developers will eventually submit)? If the main goal of the GNUstep project is to help some proprietary software developers to port their apps to yet another proprietary platform, I consider the project doomed. That's a rhetorical question, though, since I know that's not the goal of the GNUstep project.

Or to cut a long story short: If you want to make people to use your stuff you must offer them a purpose to do so (for instance I don't use a flat iron since I have mostly tees and sweaters).

I don't think that popularity should be chased at all cost and definitely not at the expense of providing more power to some developers to enhance non-free software. That's a bad thing. There are prominent exampels of other free software projects that put popularity as a higher priority than freedom and GNUstep should definitely avoid this.

Cocoa developers have a huge need for a porting solution to windows

This is their problem and entirely unrelated to the goals of the GNU Project. My need as a free software user is getting GNUstep to run fine on a GNU system, so I can migrate from GNOME to GNUstep at work (that means that it has to be suitable for basic business activity and more). And so that other users can setup their systems and stop tormenting me that GNUstep is a PITA.

And as a surplus we also would get some more apps for GNUstep (even if some of those would be commercial ones).

Free commercial apps are welcome, but not proprietary ones. It will be a contribution equal to zero (even a negative number) if someone ports a non-free app for GNUstep.

,----
| Please contribute as user and developer to GNUstep[link], a free
| object-oriented framework for application development, and help it
| achieve the status of a complete and featured desktop environment.
`----

Just good will and appealing to it alone is not enough. Thats maybe makes you feel better but you won't reach a single target that way.

Well, it will draw attention, at least. A lot of people will examine the website and some of them might find the project interesting. Others might discover that GNUstep is a liberation effort and may decide to join, just like the GNU Classpath has attracted developers (that are freedom fighters). And I really hope that it will attract users, they're desperately needed.






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