[Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf - Tue Mar 06 11:41:44 2007]:
Hi,
I am writing you on the behalf of the GNUstep project ( http://
www.gnustep.org/ ). We are currently investigating the possibilities
of getting some sort of web browser for our project, which seems to
be no trivial task given that the most code available is not written
in ObjC or for the OpenStep Libraries (what makes heavy porting from
other libraries and/or toolkits necessary). Even some browsers
written for Cocoa are not easy to port - WebKit relies heavily on
CoreFoundation and ObjC++ (which is not finished for the gnu-objc-
runtime) and Camino has lot of Carbon dependencies (despite other
pitfalls). So both situations are not easy to resolve.
Since I am a long time OmniWeb user (since version 4.0.1) I know that
all pre 4.5 versions used some ObjC Framework written by your company
internally. Since you switched to WebKit with version 4.5 I guess you
still have the code laying around somewhere without much use for you.
What I am asking you now is if it would be possible to get hold of
that code under a reasonable license so that we have a head start for
our browser efforts. I know the code is not very up to date but I
think it still demands less work than all the other alternatives (If
you're curious what has been discussed read the threads with "GNUstep
web browser" in the topic here: http://news.gmane.org/
gmane.comp.lib.gnustep.general/ ). Potentially some money will be
available if that's the show stopper but don't expect to much (in the
range about $ 500, we are a voluntary free software project and get
all our money from some donations).
I'd certainly want to hear from you, even if your response is
dismissive.
best regards, Lars S.-Helldorf
p.s.: I cc'ed this mail to Gregory John Casamento, the maintainer of
GNUstep