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