OpenBSD and GNUstep: Falling in Love with OpenStep All Over Again

Apple's MacOS X has head and shoulder advantage over the competiton for user experience and rapid application development thanks to Cocoa, based on NeXT's OpenStep, the pioneer in cross platform rapid application development with Interface Builder and Project Builder a.k.a. Xcode (Microsoft's Visual Basic still pales in comparison).

GNUstep is a free and open source implementation of the OpenStep standard, and ironically, I first read about it from Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory(pointing to a project mirror in Europe with URL that can be challenging to type to hideaway the project perhaps?) back when I was in the province. What piqued my curiosity about OpenStep in general and GNUstep in particular is that, once you've overcome the learning curve of Objective-C, it enables a developer to create distributed systems, fast software prototyping, cross-platform development, and can be used with Java and Ruby, all for free.

My favorite free and open source operating system is OpenBSD, with the release of version 4.9 having ready to install GNUstep packages, we have an opportunity to see how OpenBSD and GNUstep fits together to create a free and open source OpenStep environment.