The Free Software Foundations decision to develop and push GnuStep leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on Cocoa, so we need to discourage its use.
The problem is not unique to GnuStep; any free implementation of NextStep would raise the same issue. The danger is that Apple is probably planning to force all free NextStep implementations underground some day using software patents. This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
This is not to say that implementing NextStep is a bad thing. Free NextStep implementations permit users to run their Cocoa programs on free platforms, which is good. Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
The problem is not in the NextStep implementations, but rather in applications written in Cocoa. If we lose the use of GNUStep, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free NextStep implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs that use Cocoa. Therefore, we should not include NextStep implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-Cocoa applications rather than comparable cocoa applications whenever possible
For those who don't get the joke, this is a response to this hypocritical garbage.
Posted by Jonathan Holland on
6/28/2009.
Tags:
FSF
GnuStep
RMS
Hypocracy