I think that may be true by the letter of the definition (if we're willing to agree that there is a canonical Objective-C language specification), the reality on the ground is that Objective C is useless without some basic classes, and the far and away favorite for those are defined by the OpenStep specification. In fact, it's not clear that there are any competing alternatives, so in fact, it's not at all like saying "I want to use C, but not glib".

Bill

No, it's not. The standard C library is specified by the C language specification. Foundation is not specified by the objC language specification, it's specified by NextStep. It's more like saying "I want to use C, but not glib".