I remember 20 years ago Gnome or even KDE were toys compared to the very structured but slow moving GNUStep. GNUStep was also hard to install (no rpms), ugly but very snappy.
But nobody big put any money or devs on GNUStep. Even Sun invested in Gnome (!), what did not made sense at the time because they had invested in OpenStep & the whole thing was Java friendly (I believe Java was a first class citizen in early releases of Mac OS X).
I always wondered if it might have been because there were some legal risks...
> I always wondered if it might have been because there were some legal risks...
What was in it for Sun to invest in GNUStep? Jobs was always resistant towards supporting other platforms. So it’s clear OpenStep was the last attempt at making use of the dying Next line.
I could maybe imagine a sales pitch scenario like “port your Mac apps to Solaris”. But when OSX came around, Cocoa was steered more towards the consumer market, not workstations.
I'm saying that Sun needed an update to the old CDE and invested quite heavily in the development of Gnome to create their Java Desktop System [1]
I believe it was a mistake for many reasons, nobody like JDS, the name itself was a lie and ultimately they just helped their competitor RedHat by turning GNOME into a serious project.
I believe Sun still had all the Lighthouse Design softwares that were made for NeXTSTEP [2]
Jonathan Schwartz founded Lighthouse and actually joined Sun through the acquisition (!)
Anyway at that time the relationship between Sun & Apple had turned very bad & Steve Jobs threatened them when he saw the Looking Glass demo [2]
But nobody big put any money or devs on GNUStep. Even Sun invested in Gnome (!), what did not made sense at the time because they had invested in OpenStep & the whole thing was Java friendly (I believe Java was a first class citizen in early releases of Mac OS X).
I always wondered if it might have been because there were some legal risks...