Hi all,
I was initially very happy to see that motif would be "opened", I was
looking
forward to contributing in advancing Motif, especially since there is a
perception in
the open source world that Motif as a technology is inferior to other
open source
alternatives.
Two of these alternatives KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK are actually advancing
quite rapidly.
These toolkits have adopted many different avenues to pull more
developers into
contributing to their respective projects, from direct access to the
"live" code in
the repository, to real alive mailing lists, to participation in the
decision making
process.
Even the competition between them is probably a really big advantage as
it stimulates
a certain amount of "ownership" and stronger affiliation between the
developers and
the project.
The result of this is that these projects are moving along at an
incredible speed
as they each have hundreds of developers, thousands of alpha testers and
tens of
thousands of beta developers. The openness, and number of eyes available
to these
projects means that bugs are fixed quickly, and new features are
reasonably easily
developed.
It seems that these 2 toolkits are now the standard on Linux, and as
Linux advances
more and more into the commercial world it is taking some market share
from Windows
NT but also it is taking a slice of the current commercial unix market.
Therefore Motif is loosing ground and the latest moves by the opengroup
is not
enough to convince me that :
a) there will be enough visibility to understand what the
"OpenMotif"
organization intents to do with Motif ( e.g. what features will be
added and when, what about backward computability, frequency of
updates,
bugs database ? );
b) also the interactions between the OpenMotif and the commercial
Motif
platforms is far from clear, i.e. if features are added to OpenMotif
how
can I develop an application and be sure that those new features will
be
*easily* available on whatever platform *I* want to make my
product/code
available on ?
c) and finally I would like to know exactly how the organizations
backing
OpenMotif hope that they can "harness" the power of the "open-source"
community to a similar extent the projects mentioned above ?
( e.g. they seem to be "competing" amoung themselves at this point,
instead of trying to strengthen [Open]Motif ).
Due to the above reservations, I am going to continue using linux as my
primary development environment. This means that I interact with and
enjoy
using both KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK as my primary interfaces, while also
trying to
improve Lesstif by adding missing features to bring it upto complete
Motif 1.2
compatibility and fixing bugs.
If the opengoup start to give us some real answers to the above concerns
then I
will re-evaluate my position.
Hoping that the above is clear enough to at least advance the
discussion, and
get some/any response from OpenMotif supporters.
CP
[BTW: I am not sure that the opern-motif address above has a wide enough
audience
but their site is down at the moment, so I cannot check :-[
