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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."
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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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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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-- Joe
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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