RMS On 'Open' Motif

martin writes: "It seems RMS is not impressed by the Open Group's recent release of Motif into the community, according this email sent out on Saturday."

Comments

Correlation between liking Motif and license?

[AJWM]

On a quick read of the above messages, there seems to be a fairly high correlation between one's opinion of Motif and one's opinion of the OpenMotif license. Those that think the license sucks seem (with exceptions) to also think that Motif is ugly, dead, etc. Well, they obviously aren't going to use it anyway, so who cares what they think?

Personally, I like Motif. I've developed with it (and LessTif) for nearly a decade (on and off), it has mature GUI builders, a UIL, is Xt-based (so it cooperates with other Xt-based toolkits, unlike GTK and Qt), and there's already a patch (in alpha) to OpenMotif to make it themeable (using GTK themes). If it's so ugly, why do other toolkits copy its look? (Granted, the defaults are poorly chosen, but who uses the defaults?) And while I would like to see the OpenMotif license more open that it is, Stallman seems oblivious to the subtleties of the license. As I wrote elsewhere:

"they have not made Motif available within the free software community; instead, they have invited the people in the free software community to leave the community by using Motif." -- RMS

This is where he's wrong. To that part of the free software community that only uses free software, Open Motif is indeed free in all senses. It's only if folks have already chosen to leave the free software community by using a non-free OS that OpenMotif becomes non-free.

Motif is hardly dead -- too many existing projects out there use it and there's too big an expertise pool of existing Motif developers (on the proprietary Unix side) for that.

Reply from the Open Group

[Russ Nelson]

The ownership of Motif does NOT reside with The Open Group. It resides with the seven sponsors of the OSF Motif PST Agreement. The lawyers of most of these companies working in conjunction with The Open Group's lawyers created the license at the end of 1999. Getting the lawyers from several different companies to agree on the words was a long enough task. It was very late in the release process that it was raised as an issue that the words defining Open Source were inconsistent with the OSI definition.

However, we should state, as we do in the FAQ, that there is no intent to be anything other than consistent with the OSI Open Source definition. Indeed, I have already started working with the legal people within the various companies to request permission to change the words in the license to explicitly reference the OSI Definition. We were unable to complete this task prior to the release date, and decided not to delay the release any more for this problem with the definition.

I cannot say how long it will take to correct the license but we are making progress with the lawyers. I already have approval for the change from two companies.

Before the inevitable Stallman bashing starts ...

[scrutty]

Please note that he's not being a pedant here. Similar in position to defending a trademark,everything he says about the Motif licensing is true. Itis incompatible with the philosophies of the FSF, and the term open-source is becoming increasingly polluted.

I see RMS as forced to comment every time some organisation/company hijacks the free software, open source hype attached to some press release, which is bound to attract plenty of press coverage ,and reach eyeballs who aren't particularly clued up about the issues behind some of this wonderful "free" software they keep hearing is taking the world by storm..

Re:Before the inevitable Stallman bashing starts .

[Uruk]

open-source is becoming increasingly polluted.

Right on brother. Not many people see this, but it is happening. I think one of the major points where it started was with the APSL. Sure, it's been renegotiated, and we're told everything is getting better, but in the end effect, open source is about popularity. In that respect, it's succeeding quite well.

People still wonder about why RMS is so sore about Open source - it's because they have dissimilar goals. Open source and ESR is all about "world domination" and popularity. Sure, they're fun, but if you have to bastardize what got you to that point for that popularity, it isn't worth it IMHO. I was a happy linux user before open source was popular, and I'll be a happy user whether or not it's popular. Well, I may not be so happy in a few years when linux gets flooded with pseudo-open source garbage that trades popularity for freedom.