Operating Systems Utopia: Alternative, Academic Systems and the System of the Future

My background with and enthusiasm for free and open source operating systems started when, back in college here and then here, I needed to use a computer and there's only MS-DOS (and its GUI for your personal confuser, Windows) together with its quirks and virus bandwagon, not to mention the agony of inconvenience they bring. As I mentioned in my previous article, I learned to program computer viruses and realized there's no creative, social or educational benefit from it. Frustrated, I pined for the day I can have an operating environment that's impervious to computer viruses, can run multiple applications, is free (haven't yet imagined it's source code is also accessible) and most importantly, shouldn't crash (at least compared to DOS and Windows that pulls this stunt on a regular basis).

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.