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I don't think that page you linked to is updated. Motif was recently open sourced under LGPL.

http://motif.ics.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/
http://sourceforge.net/p/motif/code/ci/master/tree/COPYING

They even open sourced CDE under the same license not long before that.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/08/06/1335258/cde-open-sourced

Maybe. Then again, I used to work for a company that produced interactive GUI builders for Motif that somehow manages to still exist, despite being horribly managed and selling products that target an ever shrinking market share. If they can survive, so can Sun, even if they continue to dwindle in significance. (Honestly at this point I think my old company's most valuable asset is its domain name.)

I wouldn't mind having them around to do R&D either - as long as the results benefited other people as well as Sun.

Which is certainly the case now. They're very active in the IETF and other standards bodies. And even the R&D that they keep in house benefits society as a whole on some level. At the very least, it's another source of ideas that are available to the greater community. Even if the code they write is restricted, the ideas they come up with will be available to us (unless they go down the patent road, which would be everybody's loss)

As for software monocultures, I doubt that Linux will ever be entirely a monoculture, even allowing for the LSB, certainly not to the degree that Windows is (if you don't count the fact that down-versions of Windows can't even interoperate well with current versions, as I discovered last night trying to get Windows 98 to talk to Windows Xp).

The thing is, that's basically the same argument that Microsoft uses when they claim that there isn't a Windows monoculture. They say that there are enough versions of Windows out there that are different enough to provide enough variety to be safe from the effects that Geer described in his document. I don't think the various distributions protect Linux from the monoculture problem any better than the different versions of Windows protect it from monoculture. Certainly there are attacks that target a particular distribution or a particular version of Windows, but then there are others that target the fundamental design of the OS. For example, due to the design of its malloc() function, FreeBSD (presumably other BSDs) is completely immune to the class of double-free vulnerabilities that have shown up in widespread packages under Linux. Distributions don't protect against that kind of vulnerability, but lower level implementation and design differences do. It would be a shame to lose this diversity if Linux ends up owning the entire market for Unix-like systems.

noah

First off there are other companies that "license" their source code, like ICS. You could always find one of these companies and ask them how they do it.

Second, this does simply sound like a licensing issue. You trust your customers not to hack the license keys for the binary form of your product, or to redistribute it. So perhaps it's all about trust....

BX-Pro from ICS sounds like exactly what you're looking for. It spits out C or C++ for Motif, or Java. They're the company supporting MotifZone.net, which hosts the new "Open" Motif release. --JRZ

Besides Open Source tools like Glade and JX Builder, Code Fusion (and other commercial tools like the Motif based BX pro) make for some very serious competition for Code Warrior. Maybe the abundance of such tools (and the availability of excellent Open Source ones) killed Codewarrior?
So instead of worrying too much about this (admittedly heavy) loss, look forward to new tools, and try one of the other ones!