Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt
Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt
- Subject: Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt
- From: John Stiles <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 10:31:23 -0800
On Feb 4, 2004, at 8:06 AM, Nicola Pero wrote:
Yes - you are right, I don't see any short-term risk in Cocoa.
But you're still relying on someone else's business to be able to run
yours. They have the basic frameworks on top of which your
application is
built, and they're keeping control of them, so you're depending on them
making those available to you and your customers for you to stay in
business.
As a comparison, every new NeXTstep application coming out of NeXT
used to
be built using NeXTstep, and it could have been considered free of
risk to
build using NeXTstep. But it wasn't - the platform disappeared from
the
market and any business building on it was in deep trouble.
I agree it's not going to happen with Apple any time soon, Apple is in
a
better position than NeXT was, and you can consider the risk very low.
You're right. :-)
Still, in the back of my mind, having heard/seen so many disappointed
NeXTsteppers, I think there is some truth in Nicolas' argument. I do
feel
reassured when I think that no matter what the rest of the world does,
I've got full source code of GNUstep, and I can always build/port/fix
it
if I need it to run my software. Nobody can take GNUstep away from me.
This is a very FSF-themed argument, and it contains a nugget of truth.
If Apple vanishes somehow (bankruptcy, legal problem, discontinued
technology), hey, we're all up a creek, right?
The way I see it, though, is that if Apple ever looks like they're on
the brink of collapse, THAT's when I'll consider switching to GNUstep.
At that point, I can justify the hassles that switching would entail.
(Or, much more likely, I'll switch to C# and .NET or something
completely different--whatever has market support and will work well
for our end-users.) As long as Apple is still going strong, I might as
well use the toolchain and foundation that's more full-featured and
better-tested. Anyway, I'm not so married to Cocoa and Apple that my
code is worthless without it--most of my "interesting" code is fairly
platform neutral stuff.
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