Correction: Yes Openstep was co-developed to run on SUN Hardware. The $20/$25 million investment from SUN to NeXT to jointly develop the specification included the goal of SUN selling the hardware and NeXT selling the Operating System. SUN had Openstep ported and everything down to Terminal.app was Openstep certified. What stopped the release was a breakdown between the two executive teams and where the profits would be distributed.

We, at NeXT, had NeXTSTEP running on IBM's hardware but it ran faster than AIX. A certain group of IBM executives found that didn't sit in their mouth so well and asked to have it run as a layer on top of AIX. This performance degradation was then shown to the top brass to convince them that it was "too slow." This misrepresentation led IBM to keep with AIX.

This should show people just how often the "best" solution gets sabotaged for various reasons.

Yes. GNUstep adheres to the Openstep specification and Cocoa where necessary, plus with their own additions that best serve their kernel agnostic approach.

Marc Driftmeyer (Former NeXT engineer)