On Thu, 18 May 2000, Leandro Dutra wrote:
> Once Motif is now widely available to free OSs, but not free in
> itself, it wouldn't be an opportunity to switch Lesstif to GPL? If someone
> wants proprietary, OpenMotif; it he wants free, GPL'd Lesstif *may* (I'm not
> absolutely sure) force some software free, just as readline with NcFTP or
> gcc with NeXT's ObjectiveC.
A) This is probably not possible w/o getting permission from all
contributors, and if possible wouldn't be fair to contributors
(including me) who explicitly contributed to it under the terms of the
LGPL.
B) Your logic is flawed. How would this force any software to be freed?
On proprietary unix systems, Motif is already available, and there's
little incentive to use LessTif *particularly* if doing so would force
you to release source code if you don't want to.
On free OS's like Linux and BSD people who want to keep their source
closed can now use *either* Motif or Lesstif.
The only place where this could possibly have an effect would be
platforms where there's still not a commercial Motif (e.g. Cygnus on
Win32, or OS/2). And you're proposing that we change the license to
take away the freedom to use LessTif from those people who use this
platform but need to keep their source closed? I don't think so! And
now that I think of it, the Cyngnus solution already requires GPL or
LGPL, so that won't affect anyone on that platform.
No, I don't think we should even consider doing this, since it'd be
unethical for us to do so at this point, for very, very little potential
gain.
Jon Christopher
--
Dr. Jon A. Christopher / [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Project URLs:
Department of Biochem./Biophys. / spock: http://quorum.tamu.edu/spock
Texas A&M University MS-2128 / lesstif: http://www.lesstif.org/
College Station, TX, 77843 / personal: http://quorum.tamu.edu/jon
