Because there's something inherently useless about it, or because you personally don't care about the NeXTStep/Cocoa APIs? If it's the second, then it's totally irrelevant to the discussion.
The point of this is:
1) to have a working Cocoa port on Unix, Linux and Windows platforms.
2) to provide a way for programmers creating ObjC/Cocoa apps (and with iOS and the Mac App Store those are hundrends of thousands) to port their apps to Linux/Windows.
3) To move the GnuStep project forward.
4) To provide an additional set of nice, modern APIs on Linux. E.g. GTK3 is nowhere as good or feature complete as Cocoa (even 10.6 Cocoa).
5) To eventually give the possibility for cross-platform development of Mac/iOS apps (e.g games).
The kickstarter page doesn't explain why those things are all worthwhile, or why one system will solve all of them.
If they want to raise a moderately large amount of money they probably need to speak to more than just people who already totally understand what they're doing and why.
> 1) to have a working Cocoa port on Unix, Linux and Windows platforms.
OK but why? That's not a reason in itself.
> 2) to provide a way for programmers creating ObjC/Cocoa apps (and with iOS and the Mac App Store those are hundrends of thousands) to port their apps to Linux/Windows.
This may make sense, but there are important subsidiary questions:
- Will you cover enough of the APIs that a substantial number of apps can be ported?
- Will the coverage be sufficiently high-quality? For example, can you do animation through GNUstep that's as good as on platform native APIs?
- Will those app authors care about porting to Linux/Windows?
- Is this easier for them than just writing a frontend to the native API, as they currently do?
> 3) To move the GnuStep project forward.
This is a tautology. Why does that matter?
> 4) To provide an additional set of nice, modern APIs on Linux. E.g. GTK3 is nowhere as good or feature complete as Cocoa (even 10.6 Cocoa).
OK. Will one guy part time for a year overtake GTK3 to get to parity with Cocoa? What does "nice, modern" mean and why is GnuStep better? Providing the best API on Linux seems in tension with providing fidelity to Apple APIs.
> 5) To eventually give the possibility for cross-platform development of Mac/iOS apps (e.g games).
This seems basically the same as #2, except if you explicitly mention games then covering 3d and input APIs at high quality seems even more important.
