Re: Is our name confusing people....

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,
> I keep wondering if our name is confusing people as to what this
> project is.   Since our name references a bygone standard (namely
> OpenStep) and we have already, admittedly, moved on to being more of
> an implementation of Cocoa than anything else the GNUstep name doesn't
> really convey what the project is CURRENTLY all about.
>    
I think the name is just fine. To those who have "ears" and remember 
NeXTStep and OpenStep it will speak. To others the name is just an 
accident, with the GNU name in it which is fine.
After all, what do names like XFCE, GNOME or KDE mean? It is not really 
that important.

The confusion is added in defining what GNUstep is. Depending on who is 
interested in us, we are a Framework (for porting and/or development) or 
an Environment. It is not easy for me either sometimes...

If I had to choose, I'd take the name GNUstep for the whole project and 
give a catchy name to gnustep-core. Suppose to call it Espresso or Moka 
(yes, the latter is the correct Italian spelling). After all it would be 
the equivalent of Cocoa. But it shall remain a marketing label, I don't 
want to see <Moka.h> :)

II think people looking for a development environment are usually 
served, but are perhaps caught in gnustep-make... or in some rough edges 
of Gorm and ProjectCenter (especially the latter!).

People looking for a porting environment.... are surely confused by the 
myriad of frameworks and stuff Apple has added to "Cocoa" and which 
people confuse with it.

People looking for an "alternative desktop" are put away by the 
fragmentation (especially when it comes to how packages appear in the 
distributions) and the incompleteness of projects like Etoilé, GAP, 
Backbone and other "sparse" things.
Etoilé at least calls itself a destkop... I as a GAP developer have a 
certain difficulty to explain you need GNUstep+GAP+WindowMaker to get 
something together, when people on a Forum will refer to "GNUstep". 
Often people looking for a desktop environment have a less fragmented 
concept of everything than we have ourselves. Of course they don't find 
the pieces to put it together afterwards.

It is a difficult point... we are everything, but we are nothing but dust.

Riccardo