> Are we expected to believe that that's all it would take to get Cocoa libraries running seamlessly on GNU?
That's not what the project plans to do. Apple's implementation of Cocoa isn't open-source. GNUStep already has large parts of the Cocoa APIs implemented, but they're very outdated. I think fixing this on $50k is extremely ambitious, but note that the project says they'll be brought up to at least 10.6 (which would be good enough to allow easy ports of a lot of Mac software), not all the way to 10.9.
That's not what the project plans to do. Apple's implementation of Cocoa isn't open-source. GNUStep already has large parts of the Cocoa APIs implemented, but they're very outdated. I think fixing this on $50k is extremely ambitious, but note that the project says they'll be brought up to at least 10.6 (which would be good enough to allow easy ports of a lot of Mac software), not all the way to 10.9.