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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."
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.
Thanks, I'll wait for a CD.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
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
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
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
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
You can also download packages (RPM, DEB, TGZ) from ICS. You don't have to get the raw source code from the Open Group.
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?
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.)
-- Alastair
> There's just no pleasing some people
/. 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?
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
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?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
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.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
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
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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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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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...
Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects do not marry well with open source public announcements.
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?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
When well we start taking companies to task for abusing the term "Open Source"?
Paging Mr. Stallman, Mr. Stallman to the white courtesy phone...
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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
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
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.))
-- Alastair
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.
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
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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.
RTFAQ. MWM is released with the rest of the toolkit.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
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.
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.
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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
- A.P.
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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
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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.
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.
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.
"Even Prophets don't know everything"
bash-2.03$ info less
You forget,, less is more.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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.)
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.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
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
Bruce Perens.
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?
You wont be able to use the dynamically linked Netscape, because it's linked against Motif 1.2 not 2.1.
Chris Wareham
yipee!
oh wait, you mean that motif is more than just a minor subcomponent of mozilla?
--
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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
It's official. Most of you are morons.
So does this mean that Motif is no longer valuable? Is this the software equivalent of recycling? Paper, Plastic, Source Code?
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
Motif is a widget set built using the X primitives. Opening Motif has no effect on X.
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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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
This way it would not be possible to use the Motif source here.
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.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
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?
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.
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.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
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. :) It should be an interesting watch to see what happens with motif.
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
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.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
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.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz