Motif Released To The Open Source Community

Mark Hatch writes: "The Open Group has released the source code of Motif to the Open Source community. The Open Group Public license will allow the release of the Motif source code for use, reproduction and distribution on Open Source platforms such as Linux and FreeBSD, without the payment of royalties. The source of Open Motif is available now now available."

Comments

Funny

[Djaak]

Pretty funny and weird that they opensource the Motif monster after the not-that old Motif's not dead story featuring featuring that interview where that Motif guy explains how the "Motif community" is different from Open Source, being all about "Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects".

And now, OpenSource Motif ?! Wonder what happened to the great philosophy of the Motif community ? What do you mean, that community's been dead for ages ?? :)))

More seriously, we've been doing fine without Motif for a long time. There may be some interesting stuff in that source code but I wonder if somebody will take the time to read it and use it now that GTK and Qt are out there.

Re:Funny

[Antony Fountain]

My hands have been tied for a long while: I knew about the Open Sources, but could not refer to this fact. Hence I could only say: "Watch this Space". It does not, however, make any difference with respect to the argument of the article: you must differentiate between the purposes (products) to which a toolkit is put, and the toolkit itself. I continue to maintain that much of Motif's usage remains very much behind closed doors. Whether Motif itself is hidden is irrelevent.

Re:Funny

[Djaak]

OK, with these explanations it makes a bit more sense...

However, since Motif userbase (coders I mean) does'nt like Motif, and the OSS coders don't like Motif very much (and not only because of its former license regarding the posts in that /. story I've mentionned in my previous post), what's the point in releasing that source code ?

The FAQ on the Open Group's website says that "The public availability of Motif will allow the many Motif applications to more easily be made available on Open Source platforms". But a lot of those applications have already been cloned/emulated/ported with Gtk/Qt, haven't they ?

Re:Funny

[Djaak]

oops, big mistake in that comment...

I meant "since Motif userbase doesn't like OpenSource"

Re:Funny

[Taurine]

From the FAQ:
----
QUESTION:

Will Motif be made Open Source in the future?

ANSWER:

Yes, we hope to be able to make a distribution under a license complying with the Open Source guidelines sometime in the future. For now this is as close as to Open Source as we could get.
----
Doesn't that sound a lot like negotiations to get around some of those 'intellectual property rights' problems? It sounds to me like they are trying to do what the Open Source community would term The Right Thing, but having to sort out a whole lot of sticky legal problems along the way.

Perhaps the idea is to push things as far as possible, and hope that the result is lots of media coverage and a solid growth in sales for the various commercial offerings (such a X-Designer), which in turn will provide solid evidence to those less convinced contributors that going Open Source is The Right Thing for them too?

Re:Funny

[MrBogus]

Who says the Commercial Unix market doesn't like OpenSource? If anything, there might be a prejudice against PC hardware.

These guys think that Motif is the 'standard' because until recently, all of their customers owned machines that came with Motif pre-installed. Now they see that market evoporating, replaced by machines without Motif -- meaning that marketing to the Linux user base is a difficult and expensive task that requires relicencing Motif.

Re:Funny

[frost22]

About open sourced Motif:

It does not, however, make any difference with respect to the argument of the article:

One Argument of that article now falls on its face: your quality claims. You explained away any technical shortcomings of Motif by reference to available add-on widget sets. This doesn't hold true for an open source motif, since those aren't open source as well.

Now Motif will be judged on its own - and if it's still remotely in the shape it was when I touched it last time (95) it will fail this judgement.

f.

Too Little Too Late

[Billy Donahue]

You know, we could have really used something
like this a while ago, but now Motif seems
irrelevant. We have GTK and Qt, which I'm told
are much better (tried selecting a country in
a Netscape dropdown list lately)?

Motif is Still Slow and Ugly

[Homebrewed]

Why would anyone want to use Motif when there are GTK and QT around? Using Motif is kinda like making your desktop look like a (stable) Mac or 'doze machine.

Maybe the community can improve it?

[Mr. Neutron]

I don't mean this to sound like flamebait, but Motif right now is a scourge upon X in general. It is a horrifically ugly and unergonomic from a look/feel standpoint. GTK and Qt were much welcomed developments in the X universe. (This is just my own humble opinion).

Anyway, how much effort do you think the community will put into making Motif better? Considering that the lion's share of commercial X applications use it, it would be fantastic if we had a better Motif in about a year. Should we expect to see a motif.themes.org any time soon?

If only they did this three or four years ago....

--

Re:Maybe the community can improve it?

[Antony Fountain]

As I see it, the candidates for consideration are: (a) Better language interface. A set of public C++ classes should be devised, not contradicting the Doug Young Model, which encapsulate the C widget classes. There is considerable backwards compatability issues here: the classes should strictly separate the realization of the GUI component from the class constructor in order to provide the flexibility of programmer control required by this issue. Note that there are many widget set wrappers around developed by various individual groups, and there is also the issue of millions of lines of auto-generated C++ from GUI builders. Hence the proposed classes should not force too tight a binding: Light and portable are the keywords, I guess. (b) The Widget Set. Some of the Motif 2.1 widgets were not well directed, IMHO. Personally, I would much preferred to have seen a proper TabManager than the over-fussy Notebook. I feel the Container should probably have been three widgets, rather than one. Other than that, I think the set is fine as it stands as a basic component grouping. If you were feeling bold, an industrial strength Table might come into consideration, although the beauty of Motif here is the fact that you can just plug in one of these from the various component vendors already. I think on the whole I might leave this one to the experts. (c) Themeability. This in fact is not hard to do. If you want the Metallic look to your interface, say, throwing a suitable render table with the correct border, shadow, and highlight coloring, can already be done by hand. What might be of consideration here is the addition of a shell or display resource to auto-configure the sub-hierarchy in the given manner. Altering the general shape of the components themselves again should not be hard due to the fact that the drawing routines are all centralised within the Xme routines. For me, however, this issue is controversial. I dont believe it is entirely appropriate to mimic the interface of one platform onto another desktop, except in the circumstances where the product concerned is already closely associated with a given platform and the reflexes of the users are pre-primed. But then that's just my view. On the subject of "if only": truth is, they wanted to, even people in Sun were urging them to do it, but they couldnt: binding legal contracts didnt time out until recently, so their hands were tied. Dont blame the Open Group: throwing blame around isnt helpful: we cannot alter the history.

Finally NEdit is happy...

[PanDuh]

Yahoo. I can finally run NEdit, my one and only Motif application, on the original libraries. Yippee.

Purify & Motif

[unique123]

One of the biggest problems I have had with Motif is the report that Purify generates. It is full of memory mismangement. I hope that this development will lead to a cleaning up of Motif's memory usage!

Re:Purify & Motif

[Useless]

You should suggest that as a project in the Linux Bazaar of the MotifZone (www.motifzone.net). This would indeed be a useful open source effort!

Re:Microsoft vs GCC

[C.Lee]

>> Does Microsoft have *any* actual input into the
>> decision-making process/control of GCC?
>At least one of their engineers are active one the GCC development
>list, which means Microsoft has about as much influence as anyone
>else. GCC is run by engineers, not companies. Anyone who can
>contribute, is welcome.

Not the same thing. Nice try though.

Have you seen the *size* of it!

[Simon Brooke]

I used to develop Motif software on a machine with 8Mb RAM and 80Mb disk... this distribution is twenty-five megabytes . What on earch have they put in there? Home movies?

Thanks, I'll wait for a CD.

Re:Some of the bigger effects I see this having...

[powerlord]

7.Managers will have to surrender the oft-held belief that Open Source == Carp.

I always thought the old adage "If you see someone hungry, don't give him fish, teach him to fish".

If Open Source == Carp, then by fostering an atmosphere of Open Source developement, are you in effect 'teaching how to fish'?

Re:Yet Another Incompatible Licence

[hadron]

It just sucks slightly that so much open source software is under different, incompatible licences - it stops people doing neat stuff.

Server room.

[Eric Green]

'Nuff said.

How many Sun machines are on people's desktops nowdays? Almost none, and declining rapidly. Let's face it, the desktop commercial marketplace is dead. Dead dead DEAD. Replaced by NT, or replaced by Linux. Which means that developers of Motif toolkits and interface builders are dead too -- unless something happens to make Motif popular on Linux.

Make no mistake about it: the "opening" of Motif for the Open Source operating systems was at the instigation of Motif toolkit and interface builder vendors, who saw their market evaporating. The only place where commercial Unix is used nowdays (with the exception of some legacy installations) is in the server room, and you can't sell too many Motif interface builders into the server room.

-E

Re:Server room.

[Oarboat_7]

The engineers here where I work are mostly pushing the NT boxes off their desks and demanding new Sun hardware. NT has failed to live up to it's expectations for heavy-duty CAD work.

They are engineers, of course, not the office help. They run apps like Cadence, not Office.

Re:I can now build mozilla!

[hadron]

I could have sworn mozilla doesn't actually use motif. (netscape 4, does sure, but 6 won't.)

Irrelevant

[Eric Green]

The commercial environment is all based upon CDE, which is layered on top of Motif. Motif alone is not going to make Linux any more or less viable in corporate environments.

Besides, it's swiftly becoming irrelevant. Commercial desktop Unix in the corporate environment is dying, and dying fast, replaced mostly by Windows NT but partially by Linux. This obviously is not good news for those companies that have built their business upon providing drag'n'drop interface builders and such for Motif -- they see their market evaporating before their eyes. This release of Motif as semi-Open Source is a last-ditch attempt to keep those companies alive by trying to make Motif popular in another environment. Whether it will work or not is questionable -- Motif still remains a clunky, difficult-to-use (though very powerful) toolkit, no matter how much the Motif fanatics try to deny it. Otherwise you would not see so many interface builders etc. for Motif.

-E

Motif not dead yet

[mrdisco99]

I realize the Xt library is falling out of favor on the free OSes (Linux, *BSD), but it's still alive and well on UNIX(R) systems with CDE. Perhaps we'll see more mainstream development for those systems.

As for Lesstif, I think it's great news for that project. While Open Motif may have a semi-restrictive license (haven't reviewed it yet), Lesstif will be GPL. That means demand for Lesstif will definitely not go away, but now they'll have the real Motif code to work from to fix those compatibility problems that still exist. Lesstif has come a long way, but it's still got a way to go. I'll keep saying that until I can run netscape-dynMotif without any warning boxes popping up.

Geez, I'm still reeling from this one...

+++

Re:Motif not dead yet

[HarpMan]

For whatever reason, commercial Unix users don't seem to realize that they can use KDE -- they think KDE is Linux only. So they stick with CDE, since it comes pre-installed.

I liked CDE, but KDE is faster, IMHO, and has a lot more features.

Re:Motif not dead yet

[mrdisco99]

I see your point, but think about this:

If you're using a UNIX workstation with Motif/CDE preinstalled, is it preferable to get KDE/Qt, compile it, install it, and hope it works, or to just stick with what you've got and know will work. Remember, most applications you'll be running on your UNIX are compiled to run on CDE...

The same situation applies the other way around, of course, which may have as much an impact on why Linux people don't like Motif, aside from ugliness/freeness. Until today, Motif really wasn't accessible to Linux users, but KDE/GNOME has. To us Linux users, KDE/GNOME is like the UNIX user's CDE. It's what comes with our system, it's what most of our apps are programmed for, and it's what we know works.

+++

Re:Motif not dead yet

[Baki]

There is nothing wrong with Xt. It's a nice framework, though a bit cumbersome because of it's OO structure implemented without OO language support.

But Motif OTOH, is a different thing. It uses Xt but in quite an ugly way.
OpenLook, which lost from Motif alas, looks better, and also had a much nicer API. Btw there were two implementations from OpenLook: xview with it's own built-in toolkit (which was easier to program), and Olit, OpenLook on Xt, which was also quite nice.

Sun lost the X-window GUI war because Motif looked more like Windows3. Blergh. If they would have won, Unix would have had a single GUI for a long time already.

B.t.w. when Sun realized OpenLook was dead, they also released the sourcecode. But binaries had been available for free for a longer time already.

Re:Motif not dead yet

[mrdisco99]

Oops... I think I meant the Xm libraries, meaning the Motif toolkit...

Sorry for any confusion...

+++

Re:Anyone managed to dl it yet?

[WG55]

You can also download packages (RPM, DEB, TGZ) from ICS. You don't have to get the raw source code from the Open Group.

What about MWM?

[mrdisco99]

What about MWM? Is that getting opened up along with the toolkit? It may not be pretty to many people, but it sure is lean. I'd love to see this window manager become GNOME compliant. I've tried running Lesstif's MWM on GNOME with little luck. So far, IceWM (with my MWM theme -- available on icewm.themes.org) makes for a nice substitute for the time being.

+++

Re:What about MWM?

[jamesm]

RTFAQ. MWM is released with the rest of the toolkit.

Re:Motif = basura!

[Oarboat_7]

QT has many of the same "problems" as Motif.

1. It is owned by a private entity.

2. Said private entity restricts how it may be used in commercial projects.

Of course Qt is available for Win32. Is that why you love it so?

Re:The Open Group Public License

[Oarboat_7]

Microsoft is involved in a lot of things.

They sell the GNU C Compiler (and Motif, for that matter) as part of the Interix Posix subsystem for NT. So are you going to back away from GCC because 'evil Microsoft' has touched it?

Re:Free for commercial use

[nutsy]

What? You want to write Motif apps for W2K? SICK!

Or even better, write Motif apps for Mac OS and drive Cardinal Toolbox's followers absolutely balmy.

Re:Dynamic Linking

[Lally Singh]

Disk I/O is saved. Since most people seem to think that processor & memory are the end all of system performance (read: IDE weenies), they have 5400 rpm drives with a brain dead controller. But they also have a extremely fast (and underutilized) cpu.

Put those together and you have a good case for dynamically linked libraries.

--

Re:File names

[AJWM]

I doubt you'll be able to link both into the same program at once, but I can't imagine why you'd want to. Certainly they can both live on the same machine at once, just set up different lib and include paths for them, with choices made at compile and link times.

I think this is neat. Even if the incompatible licenses mean that Lesstif can't use Motif code directly (of course, if Motif were LGPL'd there'd be no need for Lesstif at all), this makes reverse engineering Motif a whole heck of a lot easier, so Lesstif can become more completely compatible. (Meanwhile, the Lesstif project also has some addtional widget sets that help reproduce/improve-upon commercial Motif widget sets.)

This also encourages the porting of existing Unix apps that require real Motif (ie use features that aren't complete in Lesstif), so we'll see more (commercial) software for Linux and *BSD. And many of those in-house apps (I'm thinking of a couple in particular that I've been involved with, a million or so lines of code, Motif-based GUI, and requiring something like a Sun workstation on every user's desk) will port more cleanly to Linux without having to worry about buying Motif licenses. (Sure, the Motif license for Linux was cheaper than a Sun-Solaris box anyway, but the minds of pointy haired bosses work in mysterious ways.)

Interesting Dilemma for Linux Distributions

[nedit]

Now the major free OS distributions have to make the awful choice of what becomes the default. Do they choose the completed and fully compatible Motif and imperil the nearly complete Lesstif project, or do they stick with Lesstif and force their users to help work out the remaining bugs? I hope they stick with Lesstif.

WOOOOHOOOOOOOOO

[HerrGlock]

Now we can merge lesstif and get some of this other stuff that runs well on Solaris but is a bit painful on Linux to run.

YES, that means that's one fewer things to have to port at work to get Linux based software to give to the client.

Re:WOOOOHOOOOOOOOO

[MartinG]

We can't merge Motif and Lesstif as the licences are incompatible. Lesstif is under the GNU GPL and Open Motif is not even open source. (despite being called Open Motif)

This release however is a Good Thing as it means the user now has a greater choice of free (beer) Motif-like toolkits.

If they eventually release this as "proper" open source as their FAQ suggests then that will be even better.

Re:Motif is dying and they know it

[homoted]

Unix is dying and they know it.

Yes, commercial proprietary non open source UNIX is dying.

Open source UNICES are stronger than ever, and will rise even further.

Re:Change of Heart?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> There's just no pleasing some people

Oh, don't misunderstand me. I am very pleased when any software is freed. I am also happy to be discussing it with you directly.

I will say that I was displeased with the original article which seemed to fail to understand the nature of Open Source. In it, you claimed that proprietary development was "better" because a user would have a contract "guaranteeing" fixes (assuming, of course, your company survived). This is, of course, the exact opposite view that proponents of Open Source believe. We feel that the only plausible guarantee is one that lets us do it ourselves.

So if there's no change of heart, why let the customers have the source? Don't your contracts guarantee that you would do anything they wanted to do with it? That seemed to be the stance of the original article.

> I can assure you this is not being released just to please the open source community itself

Well, I still find it ironic that two weeks ago (and I realize that the interview is older, but the /. effect was recent) we were reading about how the only reason Motif doesn't get press is because it doesn't make Open Source announcements and today we see Motif making an Open Source announcement?

In the original article, you seemed to be advocating secrecy and closed source. Now your open. And you still maintain that there's been no change of heart?

Re:It's still crap

[fm6]

I mostly agree with you. However, I don't think Motif every really had a chance. It's too complicated to program and configure. It's actuall worse than MS Windows!

Compare KDE/Qt code with the equivalent Motif code. It's many times less complex.

A day late and a dollar short.

[infodragon]

A year or two ago releasing Motif would have been great but now we have lesstif, which does a really good job. We also have GTK+ and QT, both soon to rival Motif.

This will help the open soucre movement but, sadly, not as much if it had been a year or two ago.

Re:A day late and a dollar short.

[jgibson]

but now we have lesstif, which does a really good job.

Bear in mind, though, that Lesstif is fully compatible only with Motif 1.2, so there will be some apps built against Motif 2.x that won't run properly with Lesstif.

Re:A day late and a dollar short.

[cvincent]

Interesting because I think that is the very reason that they released the source code.

Re:A day late and a dollar short.

[infodragon]

When the competition is winning and you know you will lose then throw in the towel early, give out the source code for free and recive the kudos/PR for doing so.

Solaris OS comes with Motif

[Eric Green]

Err, Solaris already comes with Motif. Why would you want to compile your own Motif rather than use the vendor-provided one?

I agree that this isn't as good as true Open Source. The "open source OS" bit was obviously intended to protect their revenue stream from Sun/SGI/etc. license fees (since they get practically zilch from sales of Linux versions of Motif, it costs them nothing, revenue-wise, to release Motif for free to that environment). On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from writing commercial applications against the Free Motif and then re-compiling them against the Non-Free Motif on Solaris... for the most part, Motif is Motif. For better or for worse.

-E

Re:It's about time!

[acroyear]

As a college student with no budget, and with access to a Vax/VMS box (and being a C/S major access to Sun workstations and later AIXen and SCO), yes, a 286 box (at the time, still over 2.5K or more) was expensive. The idea of "Cheap PC's" hadn't arrived yet, because the whole point of getting a faster box was because you simply couldn't run (slow or not) the software you wanted on the slower, older box, especially post-Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11. Due to addressing space issues, the chip itself just couldn't do it (and DOS didn't help matters, of course).

And no, the 486 was not really out yet. The 25 meg DX one was "introduced" April 10, 1989 (see , but the time between "introduced" and "on sale in most new boxes" is a year or more (as it still is today to some degree). 386's were still expensive boxes, especially if you needed the (then still VERY expensive) memory to really make the chip effective. In 1991, most boxes sold were still 386's, even though the 486 by that point was almost "old technology". The pentium's introduction was March, 1993. Announcents for earlier releases were generally vaporware intended to kill the early clones of the 386.

Also keep in mind general inflation. $3000 then is not $3000 now.

Good news/bad news

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

From the FAQ:

QUESTION:

Does the Open Group Public License for Motif meet the Open Source Guidelines?

ANSWER:

No. The Open Group Public License for Motif grants rights only to use the software on or with operating systems that are themselves Open Source programs. In restricting the applicability of the license to Open Source platforms this does not meet term 8 of the Open Software Definition (http://www.opensource.org/osd.html).

QUESTION:

Will Motif be made Open Source in the future?

ANSWER:

Yes, we hope to be able to make a distribution under a license complying with the Open Source guidelines sometime in the future. For now this is as close as to Open Source as we could get.

--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

Re:Good news/bad news

[barleyguy]

'It', being the damage, not the products.

He is not incorrect, and grammar flames suck.

Re:Good news/bad news

[Ed Avis]

I think you have a spurious comma after 'It'.

It's still crap

[sparks]

If they had done this five years ago Motif would a) have the "market" to itself and b) have evolved into a much better product.

Sadly, the chance for Motif to make good is long gone. It is a painfully old fashioned library. It belongs to the past, not the future.

I suppose open sourcing it is at least a dignified retirement...

Change of Heart?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

It seems like just two weeks ago we were reading Motif's not Dead on slashdot, where in an O'Reilly interview, Antony Fountain claimed:

Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects do not marry well with open source public announcements.

...and...

Motif is very much alive and well: it just isn't making public noise because that isn't the name of the game.

Perhaps the name of the game has changed?

Re:Change of Heart?

[Antony Fountain]

Certainly not. I refer to my answer above. There's just no pleasing some people: but I can assure you this is not being released just to please the open source community itself. Its very strongly for corporate reasons also. Antony Fountain.

Re:Change of Heart?

[Baki]

Yes, they try to sell some more of their X-designer, thinking that giving away Motif will help it to regain some ground.

I think it won't, for reasons others have mentioned. It's nice to be able to run some legacy Motif apps with dynamic libraries ISO the huge statically compiled ones, but that it the only use I think. Mainly Netscape, soon to be replaced by Mozilla which uses Gtk.

I must say, I have always been extremely irritated by Motif. Apart from it's ugly look & feel, ugly API (compared to the sample Athena widget set), it seemed outrageous to me that one could get a whole UNIX(like) operating system for free (Linux/*BSD) but had to pay for just a GUI toolkit, even for the runtime alone, so much money that whole 'gratis' advantage of Linux/*BSD would be annihilated by it.

Re:Change of Heart?

[Antony Fountain]

Nope. Understand this. For many companies, Linux is a convenient, decent operating system which provides UNIX home working for their employees at a very competetive cost: not much more than the price of the box itself. However, the target platform for the given product is not even Linux at all. It's an HP or a Starfire back in the office. The release of Motif allows them to at last provide a consistent environment between the office (commercial UNIX) and the home environment. You may think Qt/GTK+/Linux is going to take over the world, but you are sadly mistaken. There is no way in the world that the Sun's of this world will ever adopt these things as a standard part of their supported release. Ever. Lets discuss why. For mission critical applications, which their customers support, direct responsibility is essential. Where they are coming from, software kills. Allowing any anonymous tom, dick, or harry in to hack up a toolkit on which their software depends is a damn bad idea. Open source is a direct contradiction of the guarrantees of safety which their application domains require: the open source movement should either directly accept the responsibilities which their codes necesitate, or get out. You cannot run mission critical applications using something developed on the bunch of monkeys theory. This does not invalidate the release of the sources as a contradiction of secrecy: you must differentiate between the toolkit and the product.

Re:Change of Heart?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

First, Qt *is* available with a commercial license. So Motif is not really any better here.

Second, you think that Open Source toolkits can't "take over the world" because of "mission critical" applications. Please explain how MicroSoft has come so close to taking over the world...

Third, "mission critical" is a pretty vague term. Everyone thinks that their programs are mission critical. I would say that NASA and the airline industry require "mission critical" software. And both of those industries do almost everything in-house. They can take any Open Source package and bring it to whatever standards they desire. They can't, however, do the same with Closed applications.

NASA, for example, is pretty much responsible for why we have Beowulf clusters. They did it in-house, but they released everything Open Source.

Re:Change of Heart?

[mbaker]

Sun Microsystems doesn't tend to license their software for mission critical applications. You'll note in all of their licenses, they explicitly state that their software is non intended for many uses for which one could really call it a matter of life or death.

Secondly, if the toolkit were to be worked on by every tom, dick, or harry, and your precious "secret" code relied on it, how exactly is your program reliable? You must realize that if the toolkit is loaded with bugs, then your product will fail.

To open up one's source code does not place one in the position of allowing every person in the world to contribute to your releases. If you are concerned with the stability of your software, then you can screen and analyze the work of contributors, or simply ignore it altogether. At the same time you provide other people with the ability to learn, or to adapt their software to their personal needs.

There's a difference between "taking over the world," and converting Sun or any other commercial Unix vendor to a new graphical toolkit. It seems for some odd reason, that you believe that while you and whatever corporations you deal with continue to engineer products using an aged and somewhat lacking toolkit, that regardless of the sheer quantity of other developers using free or pseudo-free toolkits, you are the world.

The model of closed software that you embrace so much, ironically, is used by the very people attempting to have legally less and less responsability for their work. Where free software writers are often financially unable to provide support or gurantees for their work (which is why corporations like Redhat are there to pick up the slack), the companies that you consider to be the world are attempting to free themself of liability simply because it might cut into their profit margins.

Qt is a commercial toolkit, providing a level of support to any commercial vendor, that you would find with Motif, if not more. It's sad that again and again you pair somewhat unrelated things together when you comment on them.

Re:Change of Heart?

[molog]

I can assure you this is not being released just to please the open source community itself. Its very strongly for corporate reasons also.

Well seeing how Motif is used entirely on Unix platforms and almost all the major Unix players are embracing open source then this is being done to please the open source community. It really doesn't make any difference now anyway. GTK and QT are taking over. GTK may not be completely ready for advanced apps but QT is. People both in the open source community and proprietary hate Motif. I have talked with some of the IBM engineers and they constantly share their disdain of that accursed toolkit. Like it or not current development is being done with either QT, GTK or a home grown toolkit. This is the direct result of the stagnation of Motif. It is dead for good or ill.
Molog

So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

Some of the bigger effects I see this having...

[jd]

1. Gnome/KDE could translate Motif calls into something useful.
2. Lesstif can get a boost on Motif 2.x development.
3. Any cunning hacks in Motif can be salvaged.
4. The Corporate Sector will (once again) be reminded that price and quality are unrelated variables.
5. The Open Group, having been forced by the Open Source community to relinquish totalitarian power TWICE, may decide it's politically wiser to live up to it's name.
6. Any further attempts to seize control of X will probably now be abandoned.
7. Managers will have to surrender the oft-held belief that Open Source == Carp.
8. KDE/Gnome development will INcrease, as developers there realise that =THEY= overthrew the accountants at the TOG, and it's by their work that GUI stuff is being freed.
9. Work on Berlin might get a boost, as people realise that alternatives DO exist in the world.
10. The publicity will generate zero shock-waves in any part of industry, outside of computing... ...until people there realise the implication: Their $5000+ per seat licences for commercial Unix + Motif are now so much scrap paper... And their shareholders could wake up to that at any time... Greed and high expenses don't mix.

Re:Some of the bigger effects I see this having...

[ianezz]

If you took care to read their FAQ you'd see that very few of your points are applicabile as now, and that commercial unices are screwed.

To me it seems that ICS is only looking to revititalize a bit what's almost a walking dead. Please consider that bare Motif is almost useless as today: you have to purchase commercial widgets in order to get something comparable with what Qt and GTK provide, and ICS provides such widgets (duh!).

Re:Some of the bigger effects I see this having...

[Useless]

Actually, there are a lot of excellent open source widget including Xbae, Xmhtml, and Xlt maintained by Rick Scott of the lesstif team. Take a look at the software page of www.motifzone.net, there are more open source widgets to choose from including a ListTree. If you prefer open source solutions like many, then there are lots to choose from without having to buy the ICS widgets.

Re:Some of the bigger effects I see this having...

[IntlHarvester]

The Open Group, having been forced by the Open Source community to relinquish totalitarian power TWICE, may decide it's politically wiser to live up to it's name.

Well, from their standpoint, they missed a huge opportunity to be relevant.

Think about it -- if Motif and CDE were under the X11 licence from the beginning, all of you Linux users would be running Motif and CDE right now, and not Gtk/Qt and Gnome/KDE.

There would be no incentive to re-engineer the GUI the way the free software community has been for the last couple years. Instead, folks would be hacking CDE to accept themes, something like Gtk would be a small, interesting side project, and TrollTech wouldn't have had a business model and would have never developed Qt.

Meanwhile, Motif is still used heavily in commercial UNIX applications, but at the same time commercial UNIX is dying quickly on the desktop. Replaced with NT, replaced with Linux, the vendors are too busy selling servers. The TOG isn't really trying to help the free software community -- they are trying to salvage UNIX commerial software developers as the market shifts from real Unix (where Motif is a 'standard') to Linux (where Motif is disliked and disused).
--

Re:It's about time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. 'Open' has been redefined. It now means 'owned by a community of zealots who will drive you out of the market if you don't give it away entirely.'

It's the equivalent of a tavern, which used to be called 'Open' when the doors weren't locked. Now the tavern is occupied by a big crowd of the homeless who've kicked out the owner and made the beer free. Of course, the beer delivery trucks no longer make their usual stop, because nobody will pay the invoice. The wino in charge doesn't mind, of course. He's got an endowment so drinks 'free' no matter what happens.

A little late to the party

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you believe ESR then you should realize that mozilla was delayed and netscape is on life support because motif was a closed source toolkit. ESR argued that Motif was unavailable to open source developers of mozilla which stunted the growth of the project because few outsiders could actually compile it. The stunted growth of mozilla meant disaster for netscape. Anyhow, mozilla is now back on track because it open source tool kits (gtk primarily and qt is somewhere in the tree to for you weenies). Motif would of been a great catalyst to the mozilla team if it had been open sourced but it was not so the whole community has to make do with the current sucky state of browsers. Motif is just trying revive itself- bring in the crash cart!

Same mistake as Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

First waiting till competition has impressive mind share and quality and *then* opensourcing is not to turn anyone's head. Just as Qt has mainly the KDE niche carved out and then some, but has no "default library" ring to it, so the Motif niche is also carved out, mainly to better supporting old apps (there is not even a particular desktop environment it could monopolize thoroughly).

In addition, I find its uability lacking. While a simple Athena scrollbar beats everything hollow with regard of ugliness, it nevertheless is much more effective in navigating back and forth than the Motif contraption.

It's NOT Open Source

[wowbagger]

By definition: Open Source software places damn few restrictions on who can use it, what they can use it for, and where they can use it. This license prevents usage of Motif on any non-OSS operating system; therefor it is NOT open source!

When well we start taking companies to task for abusing the term "Open Source"?

Paging Mr. Stallman, Mr. Stallman to the white courtesy phone...

Re:It's NOT Open Source

[quasimoto]

Read the faq. This is just the start and anyway, these days the lawyers are into this up to their collective invoices makeing sure the license work.

I have been waiting for this and I don't care if M$ has to pay, just as long as my FreeBSD system can have real Motif. -d

Re:It's NOT Open Source

[warmi]

Artistic license or FreeBSD type one are truly free but GPL is just as restrictive.

Re:It's NOT Open Source

[[Xorian]]

I was really psyched until I read the fine print. I happen to work for one of the companies that originally worked on Motif (or rather the company that bought them). We get Motif 1.2 for free, but have to pay licensing fees for Motif 2.

I use Motif for a bunch of internally developed and used tools. However, since the work I do is only used internally, the company is unwilling to shell out license fess for us to get a recent version. Our customers can buy Motif 2, but we don't get it on the inside. Thus we are trapped with the bugs and primitive feature set of Motif 1.2.

When I saw this headline, I though "At last! Now I can drag our interfaces into the early '90s!" But no, not on our OS of choice. That really frosts me. Thanks for nothing, [so-called but not really] Open Group!

Re:It's NOT Open Source

[mrdisco99]

You're right, it does have that provision that makes it non-free. However, this provision does not really hurt the free software community. If you're only using free software and developing for free OSes then you can ignore this restriction.

Most OSes that this restriction applies to already have their own implementation of Motif (even Win2K) so not much will change for them, either. They'll still have to pay the big royalties to TOG like they've been doing.

Of course, the restriction does not apply to applications developed using Motif, even those linked to its libraries. The license specifically states that. So portability of your applications won't be affected either.

The rest of the license is very similar to the IBM Public License, which they used as a model, and does fit the Open Source Definition. If the restriction was removed, it would still not be GPL-compatible because IPL-covered code cannot be merged into the GPL or vice-versa. As a result, Open Motif and Lesstif cannot merge. There may be a loophole somewhere concerning the linked applications clause, but I'm only brainstorming on that one.

Granted, it's not a perfect license, but it's pretty good for a start. It's not nearly as restrictive as the SCSL.

+++

Free for commercial use

[Eric Green]

I suggest you read the FAQ. It *IS* free for commercial use -- on Open Source operating systems.

The FAQ says that the "on Open Source operating systems" part is why the license is not a "true" Open Source license. Still, given that every closed source Unix already *comes* with the Motif libraries, it's certainly not any big killer to anybody interested in writing Motif apps. (What? You want to write Motif apps for W2K? SICK!).

-E

Re:Free for commercial use

[Glytch]

Offtopic? Huh? This is one of the most interesting posts in the entire article. Put down the crack pipe, mister moderator.

Re:About 3 years too late

[fm6]

Regardless of the time frame or licensing issues, KDE would not have used Motif. Matthias Ettrich is no fan of Motif -- see his comments on linux-center.org.

Re:Opening Motif and Java

[Juergen Kreileder]

How could Java depend on Motif? Swing renders lightweight controls directly into heavyweight frames in bytecode, all with pluggable look&feel.

AWT uses Motif.

Juergen

--
Blackdown Java-Linux

Re:Opening Motif and Java

[Juergen Kreileder]

I think there is one more good thing about it. Java source from Sun depends on Motif and now it can be compiled agains The Real Thing. Not that it was not possible with LessTiff, but it might give some warm fuzzies.

If you intend to do serious work on the Java code you should think about helping Blackdown.

Juergen

--
Blackdown Java-Linux

Re:Why Motif look and feel (MWM) is better

[warmi]

1) Double edged sword. When I type and want to move mouse coursor out of the way I have to always make sure that it stays within the same window. Hate that.
2. This is not tremendous advantage. Infact, I think you don't use Windows often because just about every application that uses dialogs have them set during creation to stay on top ( check Photoshop for example.)
It is a problem on UNIX (specially GTK apps ) that dialogs created by main program will disappear if one clicks on the main window. I know it sucks but it is GTK problem ( or WM that doesn't honor certain falgs.)

3. Heh .. you know what ? you should blame xterm or whatever are you using for this behaviour. IT should know that there are apps launched and running from it and therefore , like any well behaved program , should ask the user for confirmation before exiting. You blaming WM ( KDE I presume ) for stupid behaviour on the part of xterm.

Windows interface works great with some small exceptions that are completely not related to problems you mentioned in your post. The biggets problem on Windows is lack of layout managers in Win32API which often forces developers to simply create nonresizable dialogs. VEry often it is not a problem but it simply sucks in things like file requestors etc ...

Netscape!

[Karma Sucks]

Woohoo! Great news. Finally I can run netscape-dyn.

Thanks, Open Group!

Re:It's about time!

[acroyear]

damn...sorry 'bout the html fubar. I'm emailing slashdudes to see if they can fix it.

Re:Why use OpenMotif if OS vendor provides it

[greed]

Well, it would allow you to use a newer Motif toolkit than is currently provided by the vendor.

Keep in mind it is very common for people to still be running UNIX versions that are many years old now. We still support Solaris 2.5, AIX 4.2, and HP-UX 10.20 where I work, and all three are Motif 1.2-ish.

But if we want to do Motif 2.1 on them, we'll have to spring for the license. (Instead, what we have been doing is using Motif 1.2 on all the newer systems. Lowest common denominator.)

Re:It's about time!

[wilcoxon]

I would like people to remember the time period of Motif 1.0: 1989. If you had access to a Unix box in 1989, you had a commerical Unix system. Period. End of discussion. You had SunOS, Ultrix, AIX, DGX, Irix, HPUX, SCO or some other System V variant. MAYBE if you were a university you might have a pure BSD box, but those were getting rarer even then. There was no PC capable of handling unix (yes, a 286 could swag Minix, but those were still expensive, and SCO was already pushing their product around for those boxes as a supported solution).

I hate to disagree, but you could get a complete 386DX system (incl. monitor and printer) for under $3000 in 1989. There were several varieties of Unix that would run on them (Xenix, SCO, and at least one other) -- admittedly, I don't know how much any of them cost at that time.

The unix hacking community centered on SunOS at the time. That was it. Since OpenLook sucked (to some hackers), most open source X apps were strictly Athena, or like XV, based on a toolkit written specifically for that application.

True. At that time, the universities I attended all had Suns running SunOS 4.1.3.x and most hacking seemed to come from the university crowds.

Re:It's about time!

[acroyear]

Ok, i stand corrected 'bout the chip release. I don't recall seeing all that many sub-3000 pc's at the time though. I seem to recall that most of the other pieces (monitor, memory especially, decent disk space) were still prohibitively expensive at the time. A 4 meg, 25mhtz 386 could handle Unix, but I wouldn't trust throwing X on it (much less a memory hog like Motif).

Re:Is this an effort to derail Lesstif?

[AJWM]

Competing implementations of an API is no bad thing. "Choice for the sake of choice" aside, in any software implementation there are going to be trade-offs, design decisions and compromises that will give the result different properties (memory footprint, speed, etc.) than if different decisions had been made.

Even if (when) Motif goes to a completely LGPL/X/whatever Open Source license, there may be situations where you'd rather use Lesstif because it fits your design tradeoffs better.

(Of course, one of the problems here is that while Lesstif and Motif may be fully compatible at the API level, they aren't necessarily "bug for bug" compatible. Since most (all?) commercial Motifs are derived from the same reference source, those are generally bug for bug compatible. (I'm talking about behaviour bugs - misimplementations of the spec, not things like memory leaks.))

Re:It's about time!

[SoftwareJanitor]

I hate to disagree, but you could get a complete 386DX system (incl. monitor and printer) for under $3000 in 1989. There were several varieties of Unix that would run on them (Xenix, SCO, and at least one other) -- admittedly, I don't know how much any of them cost at that time.

SCO was XENIX in those days, or rather, XENIX was from SCO. SCO was also selling a somewhat XENIX flavored SVR2 variant that was the lineal predecessor to the current OpenServer/OpenDesktop products at the time.

Unfortunately, all of the commercial *NIXes for the x86 at that time were seriously expensive, especially $CO, which would run you up to $4000 to get a complete system with networking and development tools.

Other *NIX variants that were around on the x86 in those days would include such things as MicroPort UNIX (an SVR3 port -- I technically greatly preferred their product to SCO's, although their marketing was far less successful than SCO), Interactive UNIX (at the time partially owned by Kodak, since bought by Sun), DELL's DNIX (SVR3 port, sold mainly with DELL hardware), Everex's ESIX (SVR3 port, sold mainly with Everex hardware) and AT&T's SVR3 for their 386WGS hardware (generally only sold bundled with the AT&T PC hardware).

In general, the hardware and software necessary to build a complete development environment in those days would still end up costing $5000 or more.

Re:It's about time!

[Detritus]

There were a lot of people running character mode Unix on 80286 and 80386 PCs. No GUI or TCP/IP, just vanilla System V with UUCP. Many people wanted to run Unix but couldn't afford a Sun or a VAX. You could get Unix System V for a PC for less than $1000.

The closed door nature of Motif

[Eric Green]

The problem with the argument that "much of Motif's usage remains very much behind closed doors" is that the commercial Unix desktop market is dying -- and dying fast. I haven't heard of any large-scale deployments of Unix on the desktop for quite some time. Linux, yes. Unix, no.

While most current commercial Linux programs are based upon the Motif toolkit (e.g., Applix Office, Wordperfect 8, Netscape 4.x, etc.), note that these all originated in the Unix desktop world. As the Unix desktop world has shrunk over the past few years, the Linux desktop world has expanded geometrically, to the point where there are probably more Linux desktops than Unix desktops deployed. None of which come with Motif as a standard component, and thus developers who are now entering the Unix market are looking at toolkits other than Motif. Which means bad news for current Motif vendors, who are seeing their marketplace evaporate before their eyes.

Thus I don't buy the argument that Motif would remain popular without the Linux community. Motif would have ended up like OS/2, a marginalized product used for a few embedded-type projects but otherwise ignored. As market share shrunk, Motif vendors would have started going out of business (that's already started, to a certain extent), and all the new projects are being done with GTK+ or QT -- my own employer has a major (commercial) project in the works based on GTK+, we did not consider Motif for a microsecond.

In other words, without the Linux community, Unix is dead on the desktop. And if Unix is dead on the desktop, so is Motif -- unless it becomes popular on Linux.

-E

Re:but isn't it still nonfree for commercial use?

[AArthur]

Switch Commerical and Properity Closed Source development, and that statement will be right.

Qt-free edition can be used for both commerical and non-profit projects, the only requirement is you provide source with your apps.

If you develop a non-profit or commerical app, and you refuse to provide source you must purchase an $1500 license and support royality for using this library. This fee entitles you to commerical quality support, updates, preferred feature additions not to mention help make the toolkit better for both versions. This price will likely come down in the future, as Qt becomes more populuar to develop for, the main reason for the high expense now is the high development costs of maintaining (and improving) a high quality toolkit.

OpenMotif's license on the other hand does allow properity close source applications, the only requirement is that they are to be developed for OpenSource operating systems, and not closed properity systems such as Windows or Solaris or whatever.

Re:Try programming in Qt and Motif

[KenSeymour]

I would have to whole heartedly agree with this one.

I have done both and prefer Qt to Motif. But I suspect that C++ programmers are a minority on Linux/FreeBSD/Unix.

Re:Dynamic Linking

[Elbereth]

Why do you think that an app will run faster when it's dynamically linked? There's more work for the operating system to do when you run dynamically linked programs.

If you have a very small amount of memory, you could end up with poorer performance when running statically linked programs, but only when you are running programs that use the same libraries (but they are not dynamically linked). You are loading more copies of the library than necessary. This wastes memory, causing your system to swap. Swapping generally occurs when you don't have enough memory to hold all the information in memory at once.

With today's computers, which typically come standard with 128M, 256M, and more, you shouldn't have any trouble launching both KDE, Gnome, and CDE, all at the same time, in separate X sessions. I have 256M, and I don't think I've ever seen my system swap more than a few hundred kilobytes. If your system does swap more than that, you need to stop editing such large pictures.

Re:Motif is dying and they know it

[kawlyn]

I remember reading a while ago about how to make abandonware open source. This may be the logical extention of that. If no one can squeeze any more money out of motif then lets give it away.

This may set an interesting precedence as well as companies can afford to support, expand, market, etc thier software they just open source it.

And no perhaps someone will make Motif a little more esthetically pleasing, as it's butt ugly.

IANAL but...

[Eric Green]

their FAQ is pretty specific about what their license is and isn't. It doesn't meet the terms of the Open Source Definition because it only applies when Motif is being run or distributed for Open Source operating systems (the OSD does not allow such a restriction). Other than that, it appears to be a descendent of the GPL -- e.g., you can make modifications and sell your modified version, but you must make the source available. As long as your modified version is for an Open Source operating system. (And yes, they have a very good definition for what they consider "Open Source" -- Solaris's "Community Source" need not apply!).

-E

Re:It's about time!

[SoftwareJanitor]

Most of the VAXen in academia in those days ran 4.2 or 4.3BSD. I was administering and developing on some of them in the late 80's. Unfortunately BSD wasn't "totally free" in those days. It was still encumbered by AT&T source code and licensing. That didn't start changing until after the release of the NET2 distro, the settling of the AT&T vs. the world lawsuits and the work of people like the Jolitz's and others to replace the old AT&T bits. All that didn't really come together until 1993-1994 or so.

Re:I can now build mozilla!

[PiMan]

Mozilla can use a crapload of toolkits. I think it _might_ need GTK to build no matter what, keyword being _might_. But it supports Motif, Qt, and a few others as the main toolkit. Plus, almost all of its widgets are native.

Re:Motif is dying and they know it

[SoftwareJanitor]

Linux boxes, mainly...

Most of the places I know of are certainly not replacing UNIX boxes with Windows anything. They have Windows boxes, but those are generally being used for purposes other than what the UNIX boxes are doing. NT seems to be able to displace only Novell in any kind of numbers, and even then, slowly. I know of a lot of places that had large Netware installations that planned to have completely replaced Netware with NT two or three years ago that are still using Netware today.

[OT] Slashdot Problems

[dirty]

From what I understand slashdot got hit by a DDOS a few days ago and it was down for several hours.

Re: It's still crap, and ugly to boot

[driehuis]

I will not mourn Motif's eventual demise, because I think it is the ugliest toolkit ever invented.

I still have memories of the days when my beautifully crafted DECwindows applications had to be ported to Motif, with its horribly unclear user interface, made even uglier by DEC's choice of default color. "Let's see, the light gray line below the triangle is slightly darker than the light gray line above it. Guess that means in. Oops, it was out and I just blew up a chemical plant. Game Over".

The good news, of course, is that I can now, ten years after DECwindows, finally plug the memory leaks I reported to Digital at first, then to OSF. :-)

Re:Indeed

[acroyear]

Well, I never really saw Motif as that hard to program...for some reason, I was a natural to Xt's programming style from day one. One thing that made Motif difficult was its timing -- when C compilers (and certainly C++ compilers) were finally enforcing the standard, and many "cheats" people got away with were getting snagged by the compiler as violations and errors. Not one demo of code in the original O'Reilly 6 or Doug Young's first book would compile on a C++ compiler.

GTK doesn't really seem all that different. I'm trying some GTK in adding a piece to a GTK app, and finding its pretty much all the same as motif so far. The "big look improvements" (skins/themes) are all hidden behind the scenes. Benefits to the end user, but not an API simplicity. Its still "create object, set parameters, create callback, add callback to object, lather, rinse, repeat" ad nauseum for every widget you create. To me (and JWZ's said the same), nothing's different. Yes, it did take a number of years (thanks to OSF's closed source model) for decent "How To Write a Widget for Motif" works came out (O'Reilly's XResource 6 and 10 had the best ones), but otherwise...

The most dramatic change for GUI's to me was Java's Swing, with its plugable models for just about everything (models, renderers, editors, etc...), but then again, I never studied Smalltalk's MVC or what was in Fresco, so i can't comment on what they delivered. Yes, Swing is heavy, but after finally making sense of the renderers and editors and all that, I have great difficulty programming without them.

Motif was also (in my later years of it) made VERY easy with the XMT toolkit from David Flannagan, in what was at the time O'Reilly's "Motif Power Tools", later just X Reference 6C.
It got to the point where I never had to do "XmCreate..." or "XtCreateWidget" again.
Something like that for Java/Swing needs to come in, but Javasoft spent too much time trying to make money for GUI IDE's to do something practical for real programmers.

Re:It's about time!

[driehuis]

HOLD IT! [pointing out why in it's time, the price may have been right]

The Athena->DECwindows->Motif heritage was probably the first catalyst for my thinking about access to source. For my favorite OS at the time, VMS, I had source code on microfiche. I intensively debugged the Athena widgets to get clues on which part of the microfiches to zoom into (literally!) in order to find out why things didn't behave according to the docs. The Athena source was really helpful on a number of occasions, and being able to read the microfiches enabled me to find solid workarounds that would be unlikely to become a future liability later on.

With the advent of Motif came the demise of access to the source code. A number of bugs (mostly memory leaks) made its way all the way from Athena into Motif, but by then Digital cared even less about fixing them then in the DECwindows era.

Ever since this nasty learning curve, I've been a devout believer in access to source code. I don't even mind paying for it, but if it comes out of my pocket it had better be affordable.

Employers are not always convinced of the necessity to plunk down hard dollars to answer questions that they (rightfully!) expect to be answered by the vendor, so the Motif licensing would definitely have saved my bacon if it only were available ten years earlier (or should I say, it would've saved Motif's bacon? I've stuck to Athena and later GTK for personal stuff because of the horrors of Motif)

SunOS was a System V variant?

[Wakko Warner]

SunOS 4 looked pretty damned BSD to me.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Re:SunOS was a System V variant?

[acroyear]

I never meant to imply that SunOS was a System V varient. I was just listing all of the "popular" unix varients available. SunOS and Ultrix were BSD based. The others generally were System V based, and each adopted some degree of BSD code for compatability with software already written for SunOS (in particular NFS, which is why the System V dfstab took so long to catch on, compared to SunOS's exportfs system).

Of course, each picked their own subset of BSD features to implement...read the unix hater's handbook for some details on the nightmare this created... :)

PC Unix in 1989

[Eric Green]

You could get a PC Unix from Interactive for around $500. The cost of PC Unix wasn't the problem. The cost of the hardware was. An 80 megabyte SCSI hard drive in 1989 costed $499. Even though Interactive Unix wasn't GUI-based and thus did not use the astounding sums of disk space that modern Unixes do, you would need at least three of those 80 megabyte SCSI hard drives to have a reasonable system. So we're talking $1500 just for the hard drives. Then let's talk memory. 4 megabytes of memory would get you a reasonable Interactive Unix setup. Okay, 4 megabytes of memory was actually somewhat reasonable by comparison to the hard drive -- that'd only set you back by $400 or so.

I looked at the costs of PC Unix, gulped, and simply added more memory to my (even then) aging Amiga. It was not until 1995, when the costs of memory and hard drives had come down so much, that I returned to look at PC Unix and bought Slackware instead.

-E

Re:PC Unix in 1989

[SoftwareJanitor]

You could get a PC Unix from Interactive for around $500.

How complete was that? SCO had some 'runtime' packages that were in the $250 range at that time, but I'd hardly have considered them to be complete enough to be very useful (they didn't include networking, a compiler, any of the 'text processing' tools like vi, ex, sed, awk or troff). By the time you added up all the pieces in those 'ala cart' pricing schemes of the day, you were usually talking $1200-$1500 for the 'off brand' PC UNIXes and $2500-$3500 for SCO.

The cost of PC Unix wasn't the problem.

The cost of PC UNIX in that period wasn't the only problem. The hardware costs obviously were even worse, but I don't think you can say they weren't a problem at all.

It was not until 1995, when the costs of memory and hard drives had come down so much, that I returned to look at PC Unix and bought Slackware instead.

You really waited a long time to try Linux. In 1990 I bought three used NCR Tower 1632's which had 10MHz 68000's in them. The best of the bunch had 2M of RAM and a pair of 40M hard drives. They were slow and unreliable and ran a pretty dismal Version 7 UNIX variant. I jumped into Linux in mid '93, and first started trying to run 386BSD in early '93 when I was able to put together a PC-clone from enough cast-off junk parts.

I was never able to get 386BSD to run on it (panic'd right away), but I was able to get the Yggdrasil Linux BETA CD to work with it, and very soon after that the 1.01 version of Slackware.

My initial Linux hardware consisted of a 386DX-20 motherboard bought used. A case, keyboard, amber monitor and herc video card from a cast-off Samsung 286 PC aquired free, 8M worth of 1M 30-pin SIMMs aquired free as cast-offs from Sun upgrades from work. An Adaptec 1540B SCSI card and a Seagate 320M SCSI drive bought on the surplus market (Digital labeled). I think I put less than $300 into the initial hardware, although I was encouraged enough after my initial success with Linux to purchase a Cirrus 5422 based 1M SVGA card, a used 14" SVGA monitor and a few other parts. I think the most expensive parts of the initial system were the Adaptec card (about $100 if I remember right) and the hard drive (I think that set me back $120 if memory serves).

I was never able to get 386BSD to run on it (panic'd right away), but I was able to get the Yggdrasil BETA CD to work with it, and very soon after that the 1.01 version of Slackware.

Re:7 Mirrors active off ICS site

[mbaker]

I'd dare venture the dotter mindset is "I think of only myself. Me. Me. Me." but perhaps I'm mistaken here.

This is exactly what posting of *seven* mirrors of binaries, while not providing mirrors for the code release, and then attempting to capitalize on this by selling CDs to people is. Thinking of one's ability to profit off of a supply shortage they could help remedy, over providing a service to people.

Apparently putting people first is childish.
What a truly sad world you live in.

Re:1989 wasn't that bad

[Oarboat_7]

There you go again, calling an Amiga 3000 a commercial Unix box.

Re:The Open Group Public License

[C.Lee]

>Microsoft is involved in a lot of things.
>They sell the GNU C Compiler (and Motif, for that matter) as part of
>the Interix Posix subsystem for NT. So are you going to back away from
>GCC because 'evil Microsoft' has touched it?

Does Microsoft have *any* actual input into the decision-making process/control of GCC? What's that? Little or none? Which as things should be.

Re:Motif is dying and they know it

[PimpBot]

Interesting idea...very flamebatey, but interesting...

What do you see it being replaced w/, then?
--------------------------

Wait for Bruce Perens, etc to OK the license!

[backtick]

This SOUNDS good, but think about how M$ had said they'll 'open up' the kerberos extensions, and how Apple was 'opening' all of their development, and how long it took to get the Mozilla license straight, along with the hundreds of other examples. Right now, it's good political karma to claim you are opening the development, but until the license is approved by the people with known intentions and experience dealing with licensing issues, I'll stick to lesstif/QT/GTK, since we know of any associated licensing evils there. Now, if the license turns out to be good, I'll be more than happy to support Motif development again.

And CDE?

[Midnight Thunder]

Does anyone whether any moves will be made to do the same thing with CDE?

Re:Motif = basura!

[Delphis]

Of course Qt is available for Win32. Is that why you love it so?

God you sound so childish with that comment.. Why the hell not have Linux AND Windows using applications that use the same toolkit? That way you can work towards platform independance. Linux apps will never over-night gain more market share than Windows apps - but an application that supports BOTH platforms and behaves the same might have a very good chance of succeeding.

Your 'I don't wanna share my toys' attitude could well hold Linux application development back, as well as giving Linux users a bad name.

Qt being not totally free (free for use, not for commercial products without license IIRC) is a valid point.. but don't bitch about things being bad if they work on different platforms.

--

Carp is open source!

[WWWWolf]

Well, Carp already is Open Source... and to some extent, we can say that Open Source is Carp, at least it utilizes it:

Carp(3pm) User Contributed Perl Documentation Carp(3pm)

NAME

carp - warn of errors (from perspective of caller)

cluck - warn of errors with stack backtrace not exported by default)

croak - die of errors (from perspective of caller)

confess - die of errors with stack backtrace

SYNOPSIS

use Carp;
croak "We're outta here!";

use Carp qw(cluck);
cluck "This is how we got here!";

DESCRIPTION

The Carp routines are useful in your own modules because they act like die() or warn(), but report where the error was in the code they were called from. Thus if you have a routine Foo() that has a carp() in it, then the carp() will report the error as occurring where Foo() was called, not where carp() was called. [...]

About 3 years too late

[Dacta]

If the Open Group had done this back in '97 or earlier, it would probably have continued as the dominate toolkit on Unix.

When was it that the Gimp guys stopped using Motif, and started work on GTK? '96 or something?

There is little doubt that had Motif been freely available on Linux at that time they wouldn't have done that and the Gimp would have continued to be a Motif app.

QT might have come out, but I suspect that the KDE would have used Motif anyway (remember, the original KDE idea wasn't that concerned about the licence (this licecne seems somewhat similar to the original QT licence), and there was no "Open Source Licence Definition" back then anyway.), and there would have been no need for the GNOME vs KDE wars.

Of course, there might have been a KDE vs CDE war, but I suspect that CDE would have been surparassed sometime in 1998, and would have been abandoned, even by the major vendors.

As it is, we have three main toolkit - GTK and QT have broard support in the free software world, but Motif is still used by lots of commerical Unix software.

Another thing.. no, the licence isn't Open Source (TM), but I don't think that is a huge problem. On most non-Free Unicies, Motif comes as standard anyway.

I don't see a lot of new free-software being written specifically for Motif, but it will help commercial Unix software get ported to Linux quicker. I guess that's a good thing.

Anyway, look at this announcement like this: Motif is now freely (in the beer sense) available on all Unixes, either supplied by the vendor, or for download. That is good.

Re:About 3 years too late

[divec]

Motif is now freely available on all Unixes, either supplied by the vendor, or for download. That is good.

I think few people will be able to distribute the source though. Their license only applies to fully open-source operating systems - so not Red Hat, not SuSE, not Caldera etc.. Debian and any of the *BSDs won't ship the source because it doesn't conform to their own rules. So AFAICS nobody big will be distributing the source with their distro.

7 Mirrors active off ICS site

[Useless]

Hi, ICS now has 7 mirrors up with worldwide coverage. http://www.motifzone.net/download/ You can also order a CD and avoid the crunch.

Re:7 Mirrors active off ICS site

[Useless]

The source should be available by the end of the day on these mirrors. We (ICS) had hoped that by focusing on the binaries and leaving the source to The Open Group we would be able to better handle the binary demand and the source would naturally drift towards The Open Group. Not happening, so we'll pick up the slack. BTW: The source isn't small either... its 17mb+

Re:7 Mirrors active off ICS site

[mbaker]

Ahh, I apologize. I jumped to the conclusion of yet another corporation looking to capitalize on supply/demand problems, when I shouldn't have.

Thanks for providing this service to everyone, I'm sure it'll be appreciated.

Re:7 Mirrors active off ICS site

[Useless]

We've just added the source code to all 7 mirrors. Share and enjoy:)

Re:7 Mirrors active off ICS site

[mbaker]

If for some reason I wanted the binaries, this might be useful. However, you conveniently leave the distribution of the actual useful part to the Open Group, and their miserable two servers.

But you probably aren't doing that to sell CDs, that would be immoral, and you're not immoral.

Re:The Open Group Public License

[mrdisco99]

They distribute it with Internix. They don't have a say in its distribution or "free/open-ness" policies, though. The GPL protects it from any Microsoftization.

+++

IRIX� Interactive Desktop?

[Adnans]

Will SGI now consider releasing their cool desktop enviroment to us? I seem to remember it was based on Motif. But now that Motif is free, why not release the Magic Desktop (4DWM) to the OSS community? My Linux box would feel (and be?) many times more powerful *grin*

What you're forgetting

[yerricde]

bash-2.03$ info less

You forget,, less is more.

Re:Is this an effort to derail Lesstif?

[mrdisco99]

As long as the Open Motif license contains restrictions, there will be a demand for Lesstif. It may be reduced as more people migrate to the "official" product, but GPL-purists will still use Lesstif.

Perhaps as the Open Motif license matures, we'll see a merging of the two projects. It seems a waste to have two groups working seperately on the same thing.

+++

Re:Not free for commericial use.

[Guy Harris]

Sounds shockingly like QT.

How?

Qt is available for free even on non-Open Source OSes, but you have to buy Qt Professional Edition if you're going to make commercial (non-Open Source) software that uses Qt, regardless of whether it runs on an Open Source OS or not.

On the other hand, you can develop, on an Open Source OS with OpenMotif, commercial software that uses Motif - but you can't use OpenMotif on a non-Open Source OS, even if it's only to be used with Open Source applications.

So you can, for example, install KDE, including Qt, on a Solaris box, but you have to buy Qt Professional Edition in order to develop and sell FooWare as a non-free Qt application, even if you're only going to sell it for Linux and the BSDs, and you can install OpenMotif on a Linux or BSD box, and develop FooWare on it and sell it without having to license Motif, but you can't install OpenMotif on your Solaris box (the Solaris box I use doesn't have Motif 2.1 on it; which releases of which commercial UNIXes, if any, come with Motif 2.1?), even if you're only doing so in order to download and build OpenFoo, an open-source application that requires Motif 2.1.

It's "like" Qt in that there are restrictions on what you can do, based on whether something involved is open-source or not - but the "something" in question differs significantly between Qt and OpenMotif.

Re:You don't even know how late.

[Guy Harris]

POSIX actually requires Motif.

Indeed? Do you have a citation to support this claim?

There may be some X/Open standard that requires it (although I don't see any X stuff in the W-Z section of the API tables for the UNIX 98 spec), but I have not heard of any POSIX standard that requires it. (I think there may be some IEEE standard for the Motif API, but I don't think it's required to claim POSIX conformance - for that matter, there's more than one POSIX standard, so one can probably claim some degree of POSIX conformance merely by offering 1003.1 support.)

Heres the REAL scoop

[Anonymous Coward]

TOG (The Open Group) had to get permission from the Motif sponsors - IBM, HP, (I think) MS and others so that they released the source code. They also had to get the concent of the Motif Licencees ALL of whome have to agree - an unlikely occurence.

This explains why its only for Open Source and can ONLY be released on Open Source OS's. The ONLY and I repleat ONLY supplier of Motif for an OSS platform is Metro Link who have seen their sales dump. In a situation where MetroLink are desperately trying to maintain any position in or with OSS, agreeing to TOG's idea is a no brainer. Dump something that isnt selling and look good in the process. Good Call!!!

Next, we have the situation where ICS are having to maintain something that is (cough) not selling so again, releasing it OSS is a no brainer - it also boosts sales of their rather good Builder product.

Finally, Motif will still be a commercial profit making entity, even more so as we can use the changes that the OSS people put in.

Read past the Open Source BS and you will find people selling Motif on closed source platforms in a close source manner USING THE CHANGES THAT THE OSS COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTE

Its a no brainer and you all fall for it again.

Moderators please note - this is an AC post from someone who has ported Motif onto all sorts of platforms from UNIX to NT to embedded. I know what I am talking about. This post may be going against the collective geek doctrine, but it happens to be the truth.

Re:Not free for commericial use.

[lovelace]

Qt is available for free even on non-Open Source OSes, but you have to buy Qt Professional Edition if you're going to make commercial (non-Open Source) software that uses Qt, regardless of whether it runs on an Open Source OS or not.

Qt is not free on MS-Windows, even for Open Source programs. I would very much like to use KDE programs under whatever operating system a computer has on it but I can't because in order to do so I would have to buy QT/Windows at $1,550! That's why I think Gnome will utilmately prevail -- because you can use it on whatever OS has a port of it (and if there isn't a port you can port it to that platform).

Re:It's about time!

[acroyear]

Athena->DECwindows->Motif

Sheesh...I'd forgotten 'bout "DECWindows"'s widget from before Motif. The HP/Microsoft side of it (which was the "look" of Motif but not the "feel" which was DEC's) got a lot more publicity...especially with that book that someone from HP published...

but by then Digital cared even less about fixing them then in the DECwindows era

Agreed. Once "OSF" was responsible for maintainance, DEC contributed next to nothing. Same for "OSF-1" (the first 64 bit unix implementation). I wasn't suprised that updates were slow for OSF-1/Digital Unix bugs.

I don't even mind paying for it, but if it comes out of my pocket it had better be affordable.

Agreed^2. $5,000 was a bit much...especially when there were such tight limits on how far we could distribute our bug fixes even after paying that amount. For the most part, when I talked our company into a source license, my main goal was to nail down bugs tight enough to at least have a better shot at a workaround. The licensing couldn't allow much more than that.

For some reason (and this hits a whole can of worms on its own), the larger companies, who seem to have more people available and actively fixing bugs, seem to have the most trouble releasing bug fixes. From Microsoft, through IBM, DEC, OSF etc...finally down to our most recent favs, Netscape (pre AND post AOL). Seems fixing the bugs is never hard, but coordinating bug fixes and new functionality into a "release" is next to impossible...

Bug fixes somehow fail to make the "release", which ends up nothing but a whole new collection of bugs.

I first saw this at IBM with the bug in the assembler's debugging code generator that forced one to acquire a patch to get gcc to work right. The patch was described and available for AIX 3.15. By AIX 4.1, that patch fix had never actually been applied to the principle source tree. One still had to contact IBM and get the patch all over again.

Netscape's 4.x releases have been similar, especially for non-windows boxes. There's the infamous "frames and colors" bug for unix/X, that had been around since frames were first introduced (in 2.0). When the source code (such as it was) was finally released, I seem to recall it was one of the first bugs fixed...only that fixed code (which was something like 5 lines total) never made it to the 4.5x tree, and its presence in Mozilla was removed when the layout engine was rewritten. Meanwhile, netscape 4.72 STILL does funky things with my default color choices as soon as I hit a frames page, the same funky things it did 2 1/2 years ago.

I give up. Time for more beer.

Re:It's about time!

[barleyguy]

Um.....in 1989 Intel had already released the 80386 and the 80486 and they were just about to release the Pentium. If a 286 was expensive for you then, you got ripped off.

That's not true. The 486 didn't even exist yet. I worked at a computer store then, and the vast majority of the machines we sold in 1989, and into the early part of 1990, were 286's. In late 1990, the 386/25, 4 megs of ram, a 90 Meg hard drive, and a color VGA monitor was going for about 2500 dollars. About that same time, the 486 came out, but the only one that was affordable was the 486SX/20 Mhz, which was a piece of crap. The 486/DX chips were still around 1200-1500 dollars (for just the chip), and the motherboards for them were still really flaky.

The Pentium wasn't released until 1994 - the marketing and posters for it hit in the late part of 1993. The bug fix to do math on it was the later part of 1994.

It's the best they could do for now

[Bruce Perens]

They brought this up with me a few weeks ago. It seems that TOG makes money from Motif, and at the moment they can't go Open Source because they can't make up for the funds they'd lose. I suppose if they could get a grant or something, an Open Source license might become possible. So we agreed on that FAQ language and left it at that - the principle here is If It's Not Open Source, Don't Say It's Open Source and they are complying with that.

I think this would have been much more important if it happened before KDE and GNOME were so well established. Motif now has two worthy competitors on Unix, not just Linux, and both are themselves OSD-compliant.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Motif = basura!

[pnambic]

There are two different issues at play here: firstly, GPL compatibility, and secondly, availability for closed source development at no charge.

The QPL is incompatible with the GPL due to the "changes may be only distributed as patches" clause. This is just plain silly, but a fact of life. When writing new code, you can grant a licence exception and be done with it.

Contrary to popular opinion, the QPL does NOT restrict you further in any way that the GPL doesn't. You can sell your apps, as long as you supply source code. You can port all of Qt to Windows, as long as you distribute that port as archive + patchset. You can't use Qt to write closed-source apps without paying Troll Tech, but then again you can't use GDBM that way either (it's GPLed, not LGPLed). So where's the problem?

The current OpenMOTIF license is, too, incompatible with the GPL. You can't take GPLed Motif code, link with Open Motif, and redistribute. The incompatibility isn't silly, either: you cannot allow your users to port away from the freeNIXes.

As far as closed-source development goes, it's just as impossible without paying up as it is with Qt. But - do we really care about that?

Re:Dynamic Linking

[LizardKing]

You wont be able to use the dynamically linked Netscape, because it's linked against Motif 1.2 not 2.1.


Chris Wareham

Re:Dynamic Linking

[Baki]

Only if you use more than one application using Motif 2.1 simultaneously you'll save some memory. Otherwise, the static version will be faster.

I can now build mozilla!

[TheGratefulNet]

its great that the subroutine package that mozilla requires to build is now available to us.

yipee!

oh wait, you mean that motif is more than just a minor subcomponent of mozilla?

--

Open Source == Carp?

[Praxxus]

THAT would explain the fishy smell coming from my hard drive, eh? ;-)

--

You don't even know how late.

[Forge]

5 years ago when I started to use Linux one of the things I noticed was that Netscape Navigator had two Linux builds. A static Motif and a Dynamic Motif version. I eventually gave up on that without ever having seen Dynamic Motif on a Linux system. It existed back then, I just had not seen it.

These days Netscape no longer produces the smaller DynaMotif build. Probably realizing nobody uses it. This release dose matter for another reason however.

POSIX actually requires Motif. Linux aims to be Posix compliant and this was one of the main barriers to that. If memory serves ( And it probably doesn't ) Caldera had produced a distribution which included a Commercial Motif and sold for around $300. This distrib either was Posix compliant or almost compliant.

Re:You don't even know how late.

[mrdisco99]

Last time I downloaded the latest Netscape for Linux(2 days ago) the dynMotif binary was included. Of course, it still doesn't run smoothly with Lesstif.

For the majority of apps we see for Linux, this is a moot point, since most have moved on to other toolkits (including Mozilla). However, people who are interested in developing cross-platform apps (i.e. stuff that runs on Linux, *BSD, and UNIX(R)) will have more of an incentive to use Motif, since it is an industry standard. This will also open up the possibility of easier ports of enterprise-level applications to free OSes.

+++

Re:Is this an effort to derail Lesstif?

[dennism]

this brings up a point that i've seen in the open-source world before.

If the open-sourcing of a project (Motif, in this case) kills a project that was supposed to be the open-source replacement (Lestif), is that really a bad thing?

The reason Lestif was being created was lack of a available open-source/free implementation of Motif under Linux/*BSD/etc, etc.. If Motif is open (eventually fully open, that is), than what does it matter if Lestif dies?

From the perspective of a software developer, would you rather have a clone that implements most of what you want, or do you want the original? Especially if they are available under similar terms?

Just because it's open-source doesn't mean it has to live forever.

Re:It's about time!

[mrdisco99]

Yes. 'Open' has been redefined. It now means 'owned by a community of zealots who will drive you out of the market if you don't give it away entirely.'

Well, if you can make that business model work, then it's all the better for us consumers.

+++

Re:Finally we can forget the poorly named Lesstif

[Rozzin]

I've always thought that "Lesstif" was punny, `less tif' being the opposite of `mo' tif' (`more tif'). Motif appears to have a reputation for being big and sluggish--perhaps that comes from having too much tif, in which case less tif would be better.

Re:Many Toolkits....

[Useless]

One of the goals of the MotifZone (www.motifzone.net) is to promote ongoing open source enhancements to Motif. Support for Gnome theme support for Motif applications is underway at the Zone... KDE is not far behind. And then Motif applications will only be as ugly as the rest of your applications...

Re:Too late, way too late!

[bonehead]

Even if the product is no longer useful, it's still a great thing that they've released the source.

I remember back when I was learning to code, finding well-written code examples was quite a pain in the butt. Had to crawl around BBS systems (with my state-of-the-art 2400 baud modem) and download the little bits and pieces that were available, most of which was more poorly written than the lousy code I was writing at the time.

I'm pretty sure there are at least a few examples in the Motif code that will prove useful to those coding new non-Motif project, both amateurs and pros alike.

What does this mean?

[[Steve]]

What does this mean for XFree86 development?

Does it mean that the whole of the XFree code can be opened, so allowing more developers to work on it.

...I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for an anti-aliasing font renderer to appear one day.

Steve

openmotif mirror in australia now

[jason andrade]

i've put a mirror up of the tar file (and some of
the binaries) while i could still get access
to the server - it's pretty full now.

ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/openmotif/
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/openmotif/

-jason

Anyone managed to dl it yet?

[Tim C]

I've tried, filling in the registration form, etc, but neither of the links (ftp://openmotif.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif/tars and ftp://ftp.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif/tars) seem to work. Netscape gives a "Unable to find the file or directory" error...

Anyone had any better luck?

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Anyone managed to dl it yet?

[Useless]

Slashdot effect... The files on the ftp server are fine. We now have 7 mirrors online. Hopefully that should help!

Re:Anyone managed to dl it yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

remove the tars portion of the URL and you will get ftp.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif, which works.

Re:Anyone managed to dl it yet?

[fatbofh]

ftp://ftp.opengroup.org/pub/open motif/R2.1.30/tars

You'll probably be better off using a command line ftp client while the server is slahdotted.

Re: Score 0, Flamebait

[frost22]

*sigh*

Talking about moderators not understanding sarcasm. Or whatever - is there any place to discuss moderator performance ?

f.

Not free for commericial use.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must still pay a royalty if used in commercial products. They say public license but don't mention what type LGPL, GPL. They don't say who's going to fix bugs, provide video driver support.
Their GUI tools won't be free.

I say merge MOTIF into lesstif and use lesstif!

Re:Motif = basura!

[Antony Fountain]

"Problem" ?? This, as far as commercial organisations is concerned, would be very much in its favour. It is absolutely essential that someone somewhere is directly prepared to stand up and be responsible for the software which they produce. None of this denial of warrantee you see in the open source movement. How would you feel about getting on an aircraft if you knew that the test programs for the engines were written by people who were not prepared to stand up and be counted?

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean that Motif is no longer valuable? Is this the software equivalent of recycling? Paper, Plastic, Source Code?

Re:Question

[ArthurDent]

Not in the least!

The company I work for has a large MOTIF-based application that's been in constant development for years. If we were able to get the source code for MOTIF for the platforms we use (Sadly, Linux isn't among them, principally we use SGI.), then we would be able to know what we're running and be able to find and fix MOTIF bugs. That is a much better state of affairs than depending on SGI (or any other closed vendor) for that.

Is MOTIF dead for new software? Probably. Is MOTIF dead? No. Actually, it might just go for a walk! :)

Ben

Re:It's about time!

[MrBogus]

Now days there is the mindset that people inevitably upgrade to newer and faster chips when they are released. However, in the 1980s that wasn't necessarily true.

A friend had some old Computer Shopper mags from ~1991 (he did some advert layout back then). Even though i486s were being sold, ads for 1MB 8086 machines were still very common. Even big vendors like IBM and Compaq sold them. And it makes sense -- WordPerfect/DOS really doesn't run much better on a 486 than a 8086

The Open Group Public License

[Percible]

This potentially sounds like a great thing - but I'll wait 'till people have had a chance to peruse their 'Open Group Public License' before getting too happy... IANAL, but I would like to see what the legal eagles among us make of it..

~P

Re:The Open Group Public License

[C.Lee]

>This potentially sounds like a great thing - but I'll wait 'till
>people have had a chance to peruse their 'Open Group Public License'
>before getting too happy... IANAL, but I would like to see what the
>legal eagles among us make of it..

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Microsoft a part of the Open Group? If it is, does anyone think it should be stated in the body of the license agreement that Microsoft-style "Embrace and Extend" efforts are expressly forbidden before the Open Source/Free Software Community agree to any terms involved this effort.

Hey, that's great!

[undertoad]

I guess now we can quit development of lesstif, KDE, and Gnome!

Nothing to do with XFree86

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

Motif is a widget set built using the X primitives. Opening Motif has no effect on X.


--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

Re:Why Motif look and feel (MWM) is better

[Antony Fountain]

(1) is a user misunderstanding. Try changing your XmNfocusPolicy to XmEXPLICIT. (2) is a user misunderstanding. This is configurable in the window manager. (3) is a programmer error if this occurs. The programmer should install a WM protocol to catch window closure action and handle appropriately. NOTHING of what you object to in Motif is unsupported.

Re:1989 wasn't that bad

[MrBogus]

In 1989, Apple was selling the stripped down Mac IIfx model (40Mhz 030, 4MB, 40MB disk) for $10,000. The Unix version was even more expensive, running nearly $20K with a upgraded SCSI card and A/UX. On the other hand, with academic pricing, you could get a SE/30 with A/UX and a 9" screen for maybe $7,000.

An IBM MCA PC could easily run $5,000. A base level Mac SE was $3,000 with no hard drive. Prices were pretty high back then!

Microsoft vs GCC

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Does Microsoft have *any* actual input into the
> decision-making process/control of GCC?

At least one of their engineers are active one the GCC development list, which means Microsoft has about as much influence as anyone else. GCC is run by engineers, not companies. Anyone who can contribute, is welcome.

Re:It's about time! (Extended Dance-Mix Metaphor)

[Error Spelling]

It's the equivalent of a tavern, which used to be called 'Open' when the doors weren't locked. Now the tavern is occupied by a big crowd of the homeless who've kicked out the owner and made the beer free. Of course, the beer delivery trucks no longer make their usual stop, because nobody will pay the invoice.

Yeah, but the beer in our tavern never runs out, no matter how much we drink. Even if there are a few freeloaders, we can still brew enough for everyone.

Re:It's about time!

[acroyear]

I could never figure out why they would push it as a standard UI while pricing it out of reach of the hacking community.

HOLD IT!

I would like people to remember the time period of Motif 1.0: 1989. If you had access to a Unix box in 1989, you had a commerical Unix system. Period. End of discussion. You had SunOS, Ultrix, AIX, DGX, Irix, HPUX, SCO or some other System V variant. MAYBE if you were a university you might have a pure BSD box, but those were getting rarer even then. There was no PC capable of handling unix (yes, a 286 could swag Minix, but those were still expensive, and SCO was already pushing their product around for those boxes as a supported solution).

The unix hacking community centered on SunOS at the time. That was it. Since OpenLook sucked (to some hackers), most open source X apps were strictly Athena, or like XV, based on a toolkit written specifically for that application.

If you needed Motif, you bought it (since Solaris didn't support Motif in any official vein until 1993). If you had one of those boxes, you could afford it. Generally, university CS departments and corporations were the only places Unix was found. So generally, if you had a unix box at the time, you could afford the extra few $K for Motif (if it wasn't already there). The idea that every student could have their own Unix-like box was absolutely unheard of. Workstations were $20-150K, and most unix boxes were "mini computers" that still took up the size of 2 refridgerators and needed an air conditioning box of the same size to match (hence the whole idea of X terminals and central servers).

There was no "100% Free" system out there that was reliable or fast enough to bother. Linux is just now getting the kind of attention its getting not because its especially better, but because the platform was suited for (the Intel box) is finally fast enough to handle it.

Motif was a commercial solution to the problem of commercial software vendors, priced at the time when commercial software on unix boxes was expensive. That the prices even recently were as low as $99 for motif (binaries only) was unheard of 7 years ago when I graduated.

Licensing terminology

[Tet]

The rights granted under this license are limited solely to distribution and sublicensing of the Contribution(s) on, with, or for operating systems which are themselves Open Source programs.

I wonder what they're defining an operating system to be? Is it just the kernel, or the complete installation? If it's the former, then there's no problem. If it's the latter, then does this mean Linux/BSD dsitributions incorporating closed course components (e.g., Netscape, Acrobat Reader etc.) will run into problems? Also note that the license explicitly defines the term "Open Source", and it doesn't mean the same as the OSI definition.

Posixly exhilarating

[leonbrooks]

> POSIX actually requires Motif.

Well, then: another one bites the dust. Are there any standards that Linux _doesn't_ own?

Try programming in Qt and Motif

[SpinyNorman]

Or implementing a new widget in either. Qt is a joy to use. Motif is a pig. I've written huge amounts of Motif code, and never did get to like it. At best you learn how to work around it's deficiencies and bugs, but you never actually LIKE it. Qt is such a clean design and natural match with C++, that it is a genuine pleasure to use.

File names

[Glytch]

Last time I checked, Lesstif names its binaries and headers the same as Motif does. Will I be able to have both at once, should I want to?

Bad for OS/2, Win32

[mvw]

There are XFree86 ports for OS/2 and Win32 (Cygwin based).

This way it would not be possible to use the Motif source here.

Excuse

[superlame]

I hope that this doesn't hurt QT and GTKs march foward as the modern toolkits to use too much.

I hate Motif. I hate the look, I hate the feel, and I hate trying to program with it. I was just starting to look forward to it dieing, and they pull this stunt.

Why can't the big unix companies show support for something decent by beafing up the internationalization support of Qt and Gtk, the nport all their code to that. According to the standards put forth as to what would be needed out of a toolkit to replace gtk, in the recent interview with the motif book author, Gtk has everything needed in beta. Stable versions of with the internationalization and Xt like functionality should be released in Gtk+ 1.4, slated for release later this year (I think).

It's about time!

[smartin]

I always hated the OSF for forcing one of the major splits in the Unix world. They were a knee jerk response to Sun and AT&T trying to create a unified base for Unix to move forward. The only useful thing OSF ever came up with was motif, but it was never open. I could never figure out why they would push it as a standard UI while pricing it out of reach of the hacking community. I suppose it's too late now that we have gtk+ and qt, but it would still be nice to be able to download and install the motif RPMs for free so that we can build xmcd and other useful apps.

Re:It's about time!

[acroyear]

Yes, I'll conceed that not being able to fix motif bugs was a pain in the ass.

By the time I was working in Motif and getting paid for it, I had already taken to using either Doug Young's C++ framework, or David Flanagan's XMT library (I _really_ wish he'd do something like that for Java/Swing, rather than just the reference rehashes he's been doing for O'Reilly recently...).

Re:It's about time!

[Shimbo]

The only useful thing OSF ever came up with was motif, but it was never open.

Of course it was - it's just you have a strange definition of open. In the days when Motif was being developed nobody would have used 'open' in such a way that it excluded all commercial UNIXes.

Admittedly, things have moved on since then.

Motif is dying and they know it

[(void*)]

Which is why they are now "releasing this for open-source operating systems". They are getting desperate, yes? I guess it is too late.

Quick corrections... basic statment is good

[Felinoid]

Your basic statment holds just correcting a few errors :)

Minux ran on XTs and 386s the XT version was hardware bound and didn't run on 286s...
SCO Xenix was also originally an XT Unix that was ported to the 286 and 386.

Minux did not handle GUIs and as far as I know Xfree never ran on Minux.

Xenix had a commertal X11 but again as far as I know this was rather expensive as was Xenix itself.

Linux started a bit before Windows 95 came out and ran fine on 386 hardware.. Windows 95 REQUIRED 386 hardware forcing XTs and 286s into early obsolesence (Demand died when Dos was discontinued.. and even that took a while)

Linux could not penitrate the user market at all and needed PCs powerful enough to run as servers before Linux could enter the server market.

But the hacker market.. ehh... Hackers continued to use XTs...

Anyway Motif was made in a time when Unix ment commertal servers and hackers ment home made hardware...

Finally! (Too late?)

[machwon]

I think this is a great thing. But I also think it may be too little too late. OS is already well on its way with other gui toolkits (Gtk, at least) that are actively being developed to suit our needs.

It seems they are seeing the trend and are making an attempt to get people to use Motif before they are a total dinasaur.

machwon

Irrelevant to that

[Christopher B. Brown]

• This has nothing to do with the XFree86 code base.

  The restrictions that the XFree86 team have on releasing source code have nothing to do with the non-freeness of Motif, and everything to do with the fact that hardware vendors sometimes release documentation for hardware on the basis of Non Disclosure Agreements.

  Why would you think that the "partial freeing" of Motif would have anything at all to do with the activities of The XFree86 Project?

• As for anti-aliasing font handling, there are two methods to implement this:
  • As an extension to the X protocol.

    Perhaps in X11R6.5.

    As an extension, this would mean that only new applications that are aware of the new extension would use the new font handling scheme.

  • As an extension to some existing libraries.

    For instance, the GNOME "Canvas" appears to provide support for the use of anti-aliased fonts right now. Ditto for Display Postscript.

    Of course, in order to use the antialiased facilities, applications have to be specifically coded to use things like GNOME Canvas or DPS. Existing applications don't get benefit of it "for free."

  The only way that "legacy" applications would get any benefit from this extension is if they use libraries like GTK or Tk, and those libraries can be compatibly retrofitted to use anti-aliasing.

  Again, this is a matter that is almost entirely irrelevant to the "opening up" of Motif source code.

This is a really good thing

[Beached]

Motif is used extensivly in corporate enviroments. It has been here for quite a while and probably still will be for some time. This will allow for an even greater corporate acceptances of Linux and FreeBSD in big business.

Many Toolkits....

[IceFox]

As I have moved to Linux development toolkits have been a primary thought. I have dabbeled in gtk and even tried my hand at motif once, but it was QT that I kept coming back to. I was not looking to sell my software under windows and so the qpl was more then fine for me. I found the qt toolkit suited me completly.
I heard arguments that motif is better and gtk is better etc etc. Personally I never liked motif for one reason and one reason only. It is ugly. Ok, maybe it is a great toolkit, but it is still ugly. A funny as it is the original reason I got into Linux in the first place was that kde's toolbars could horizontal shade before win98 did(plug goes to a Chris I met randomly at the computer cafe for interducintg me to Linux). How ironic that I switch to Linux because it looks better? For that same reason I was first trying my coding hand at qt way back in the day. I recently took another look at motif now that I was beyond that "look isn't this cool" three year faze. Realizing that it cost money to develop for motif closed the door on that toolkit in my mind. I continued working on my qt projects. I have spoken to a number of people who ask the question, so what toolkit should I use? This gets asked in a lot of commercial places also. To my dismay they have all chossen motif simply because it is everywhere even if it is ugly. I a previus slashdot article someone commented that maybe motif would just die because of its closed sourse. We all knew that it wouldn't happend, but we also knew that in a small way was true. The motif toolkit wasn't progressing that fast and was quite closed source.
With this anouncement it makes a lot of people take another look at motif, myself included. As sad of a statement as it is I hope some people go and pretty up motif. Along with everything else obscure bugs might be fixed. Even thought I am not the greatest coder by any means I can happily say that I found and reported two very obscure bugs in qt that I never would have found withouth the source. (and yes in the new release they are patched :) It should be an interesting watch to see what happens with motif.
By no means will I stop working with qt and gtk, but I will be keeping a eye out for future motif releases. Who knows what might come of this.

Bandwagon's the word!

[decaf_dude]

This seems similar to Tannenbaum's release of MINIX under BSD-style license recently. Yeah, he can say his lawyers were chewing on it for two years, but these people are obviously jumping on the bandwagon.

Obviously the Open Source is here to stay.

Re:directory tree widget?

[unique123]

I was able to make a directory tree windows explorer type app on unix using netscape_tree source from the Microline Widget library over at mozilla. It looks good, but there are a couple bugs that i can now look into because they seemed to be occuring in the Motif library.

Opening Motif and Java

[blackc]

I think there is one more good thing about it. Java source from Sun depends on Motif and now it can be compiled agains The Real Thing. Not that it was not possible with LessTiff, but it might give some warm fuzzies.

Re:Finally we can forget the poorly named Lesstif

[j-pimp]

Well the less command in linux is more++. BTW, in FreeBSD more has less like functionality, more or less. Therefore Lesstif would be a better version under your frame of logic. Although the real reason is that laMtif (laMtif ain't Motif) sounds bad.

Nope!

[Greyfox]

Actually this is a last-ditch effort to keep their IP from becoming completely devalued as GTK and QT take over the UNIX GUI programming market. They've been talking about doing this for quite a while now. Their hope is that they can convince some developers to use Motif by doing this. They are, of course, going to try to retain as much control as possible while appearing to release the source to the public. I expect we'll see more companies doing this in the future.

It's irrelevant anyway. Motif has the same 1980s feel that Windows 3.1 does. GTK and QT both have much more robust and interesting development communities.

Dynamic Linking

[grrussel]

Hot Damn!

Netscape can finally run fast, SOffice, WordPerfect, Acrobat Reader, FrameMaker, etc...

I might even try a CDE desktop...

Nah...

Its a bit late. I mean, I'm only going to use it
for Netscape for ~6months and Nedit.

Too late, way too late!

[segmond]

I guess they must have been reading the dozens of discussions threads on how Motif is dead. Trying to recuse it by releasing it to the Open Source Community will not work! It is way too f$#$ing late! I am very much in love with gtk+ and qt. RIP Motif.

Yet Another Incompatible Licence

[Julian Morrison]

The balkanization of Open Source continues. This won't merge with any existing license (including LessTif's). It's also a tad obnoxious in that you can't use it with commercial OSes, and it has all sorts of scary auto-termination clauses.

IOW: not quite as bad as the SCSL, but still a sneaky attempt to co-opt open source into helping them while still leaving their code isolated.

Although, reading the licence, they've slipped up in that they've provided no way to slurp back up the changes into the official motif, apart from releasing a license upgrade - they've forked their own code. Silly them.