On Wed, May 17, 2000, Chen Shapira wrote about "RE: Motif is now Open Source":
>
> > Take a look at
> >
> > http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/
> >
>
> No it isn't.
> http://www.linuxprogramming.com/news/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-05-17-001-03-
> CD
>
> The source is avaliable only for "free software" platform, this doesn't
> conform to the open source definition - so it isn't open source.
It doesn't conform to the "open source" definition of opensource.org, but
you can't argue that now you can get the source freely on your Linux machine -
previously you couldn't. In fact, on non-free OS's you always had Motif on
it because the distributers of these UNIX OSs bought motif licenses. So I
don't think it's fair to judge their new license scheme.
The Open Group claim that the current free-os-only license is only temporary,
and that they are hoping to change it to a "real" open source one soon.
> Besides - motif sucks.
Look, Motif has its share of problems: it's very difficult to program (with
the standard Xt-like functions in C), Motif 1.2 lacked a few important widgets
(but 2.1 should not, I think). It's (actually Xt's) object-orientation-like
is a bit annoying. But all in all, it's not *that* bad. I've done some nice
things with it, and though there are toolkits I like better (my favorite
being Tcl/Tk), it deserves it's credit. There are several important applications
using Motif, like DDD and Netscape (which converted to GTK only because a
free motif did not exist. The free-os is a non-issue here too, because
commercial os's have motif share libraries anyway).
--
Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, May 17 2000, 12 Iyyar 5760
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Cats aren't clean, they're just covered
http://nadav.harel.org.il |with cat spit.
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