It's not about NeXT or WindowMaker or anything like that. I don't care about the NeXT look and feel and as you can see from the video and the screenshots GNUstep has moved away from that look.

I should point out that there are anumber of companies who have moved their products to Windows using GNUstep. THIS is the point of GNUstep, to allow both development of new projects and porting of existing projects to other platforms without the need for much code change. There are two examples of companies which do this today:

http://www.testplant.com - Testplant ported their EggPlant app (a testing app which is script driven) which is the core of their company to Windows. NOW the revenue from the Windows version makes up more than 2/3rds of the company's revenue.

http://www.apportable.com - Got an Android? Got an android that runs any game which is familiar to you from iOS... well, guess what... chances are these guys probably ported it... and they used GNUstep to do it. GNUstep is currently running on millions of devices out there.

So the sentiment "just get a mac" in this context, makes absolutely no sense at all and, in fact, completely misses the point.

Greg C.

Using GNUstep to develop Android apps is a HUGE win. You really should push this angle more. Look at the success Xamarin have with their 1 language for multiple mobile devices solution. You have the same thing going.

you really should put the essence of this commend on the kick starter page. It makes it absolutely clear why I should care and why it is a cool project.

edit: Both company's that you mention should just sponsor the project and/or pay you to work on it full time as this is the backbone of there business

I feel much the same.

Even on OS X the potential of NeXTstep remains largely unrealized as most apps do not take advantage of the APIs in a way that allows leveraging heterogeneous apps into a conceived workflow.

As a result, a fantastic opportunity to create an environment that is composable in a consistent, homogeneous manner is wasted.

What is worse is that such an environment does not exist anywhere in computing.

The closest thing that exists to realizing an entirely composable or scriptable environment is emacs, and that environment has not incorporated progress in graphics into its ecosystem.

Consequently, the capacity to compose workflows that interact with graphics is not possible, leading to a reliance on console style UIs for the most part.

I think that GNUstep losing steam has less to do with people who care choosing OS X and more to do with Gnome and KDE having a head of steam already by the time GNUstep came about, a characteristic that has lead to many cases of used technology being a consequence of circumstance rather than merit.

I just want an entirely scriptable, composable computing environment anywhere, and it is maddening that such does not exist as everyone would benefit from such.

Currently users either have to remain attached to a UNIX CLI userspace that does have composability or only have that composability in a small subset of applications due to the lack of a uniform interface in which to do so.

What computers are best at is what is least accessible in computing presently, leading to people having to do automatable tasks manually.

It's a tragedy that such is the case after decades of examples of how to achieve that being partially implemented.

Computing has even regressed greatly in this regard in the past decade due to giving our generated data to gatekeepers, when the data was local machines at least then we could apply rules to the data to transform it according to the user's whims, such as filtering out noise in a RSS feed, automating archival of useful information etc.

Now users are entirely reliant on the gatekeepers allowing them to transform information, often which is neither possible or comes accompanied with distracting ads or other attention parasites.

I would gladly switch to an ecosystem that realized the vision NeXTstep et al. had so that managing complexity and transforming data did not entail abandoning solidly engineered GUI applications in the process, sadly this is another case where computing has been unsuccessful in achieving ambitious goals.

grimwire.com/local is trying to solve that by turning workers into web servers and letting them power user plugin systems. I'm in the process of redesigning the docs and packaging it with webrtc tools, so it's getting some work atm, but here are some videos of things I've tried while working on it [1][2][3].

1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nrZiJph6SU&sns=em

2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAMTomxQV80&sns=em

3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erVREtQoMCc&sns=em

> But, as we said prior, the people that care just use OS X. Their target platform is OS X. The Linux users are happy with WINE and GTK+. There's nowhere for the project to go, and I fear that this Kickstarter will be a failed effort.

A modernised GNUStep could allow easy ports of a lot of MacOS software, both open and closed-source. That in itself might be enough to kickstart a non-MacOS ObjC/Cocoa ecosystem.

+1 for this... Xamarin seems to make most of their money going the other way with monotouch, this is a proven way to revenue.

I guess ideally this would need a company that is the equivilent of Xamarin to drive this and objective C forward onto the other platforms.

I don't really see why; GNUStep is already an established FSF project, and I see no need for a company. What it needs is a bit of attention, which is what this kickstarter will hopefully achieve.