Mark Hatch writes:
> At 09:42 PM 5/16/2000 -0400, Suhaib M. Siddiqi wrote:
> >I guess to have more developers use MOTIF for non open source projects.
>
> Maybe, but I sense they are in a difficult position.
>
> For whatever reason, they have drawn this hard line between proprietary and
> open source OS.
I think they are probably doing this to avoid changing their existing
royalty-based contracts with commercial/closed source OS vendors such
as Sun, HP, SCO, etc. As there is still money to be made there. On
the other hand, that licensing scheme simply doesn't work on open source
OS platforms like Linux and FreeBSD. This is why all the commercial/closed
source UNIXen have unified behind Motif and CDE, but that didn't happen
on Linux or FreeBSD. Instead, the other open source toolkits like GTK
and Qt (and desktop environments based on these) appears to dominate the
open source OSes.
While we have LessTif, I have yet to see any important apps (such as
Frame Maker, Adobe Acrobat, Netscape, and myriad of other "big name"
Motif-based apps) embracing LessTif, for whatever reason. In fact,
in the case of Mozilla we have seen it move away from Motif. On a
similar vein, none of the distributions of Linux or FreeBSD use a
LessTif-based CDE-like desktop environment as the default. That is
unfortunate, because LessTif is in a position to be the unifier
of toolkit, GUI and desktop environment for all UNIX flavors, but alas
it doesn't (yet) have that critical mass.
I surmise that this is an effort on the part of the Open Group to try
to get the open source community to embrace the Motif API more, and
I guess in that sense it could also be a good thing for LessTif as
an alternate implementation of the same API..
My $0.02.
-Ti (author of xmcd, xmmix, etc)
--
/// Ti Kan Vorsprung durch Technik
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