The GAP Charter

The purpose of this project is to implement a set of administrative applications, user level applications and supporting framerks using GNUstep and for GNUstep.

These applications create together a workspace or desktop environment.

Our goal is for each application, tool or framework, if possible, to:

  • support maximum portability to all GNUstep supported platforms, including Windows
  • create a corresponding Cocoa/Mac port: this is very useful for many applications that are then available natively on Mac and helps testing and comparison of the application against Cocoa
  • support of the widest range of compiler versions, minimum dependency requirement
  • allow the usage without requiring other GAP framework and applications or, if, a minimal set of them

The project aims to gather applications, besides original writing of them, through:

  • Porting existing OPENSTEP/Cocoa/Mac applications, which are already Free Software, to GNUstep
  • Port OPENSTEP/Cocoa applications which are nowadays abandoned, by speaking to the former companies, attempting to open their source code
  • Rescueing existing applications which are abandoned and suffer bitrotting and keep them maintained and improved. If possible a port to Cocoa is also attempted

Cooperation with companies about older applications has been proved difficult, but we encourage anybody to contribute by asking and pointing out to existing software and by contacting current and former developers.