On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 09:44:52AM -0400, Mark Hatch wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> (I realize that this is a technical mail list and not and advocacy one, so
> I am more than willing to take this offline with any interested parties.)
Oh, from time to time some advocay shouldn't hurt ;-)
> I am a little disturbed over the competition that some on this list
> believes exists between LessTif and OpenMotif. I believe that the
> "competition" (due to a lot of ***hard work*** by members on this list) is
> not between essentially two implementations of the same standard. The real
> "competition" is between the Motif API and those APIs advocated by others.
>
> True that ^&*^*!@ license that TOG released Open Motif under makes it
> difficult to merge and cross fertilize the two implementations. But with
> the high degree of compatibility shown by Rick's running of the LessTif
> compatibility tests (I hope that the LessTif team doesn't feel the need to
> be bug-for-bug compatible with OpenMotif ;-) ), many developers should see
> them as alternatives with slightly different features:
>
> LessTif: LGL + Motif 1.2.x + active open source community
> OpenMotif: Restricted license + Motif 2.1 + commercial user base + more
> extensive internationalization (???not sure on this one, so please correct
> me if I have the wrong impression here)
>
> I see them that way and that is why I try to make sure that every new
> release of LessTif is announced on the MotifZone too. Now that it looks
> like the LessTif team has largely succeeded in its goals to implement a
> "Free" Motif, maybe its time to figure out how to get Motif growing again?
I disagree ...
We also depend on 'commercial users' and in fact we regularly
reports/patches/etc. from 'commercial' users. And if we miss something
in the 2.x area that 'we' can supply it's also on our todo list.
Actually a LessTif on the current level a few years ago would have
helped M*tif in the opensource community. I doubt that adding things
is enough to get people/developers switch back. A lack of features
is not the _main_ argument against Motif, isn't it?
(but may be: too big, too hard to code/use, no fancy default look,
no C++, etc.)
As long as OM doesn't become LessTif 1.0 by going opensource we will
just have to go on and work on LessTif - which shouldn't prevent people
from also writing some new gimmicks.
Not sure what happened to OM, but last time I tried to build I failed
miserably: read some docs again and it failed again anyway. Even from CVS with LT
you're done with "CVSMake && configure && make" in an impressive number
of attempts on various systems. As recently discussed our memory management
is better, or to be more precise: we have less memory leaks (at least on
the are of our simple test cases).
Actually my wishlist based from daily usage of 2-3 M*tif apps has only 2 things
remaining which actually make me distinguish between the Motif and LT version
- and for one a patch is reported to come. So if TOG takes sufficiently long and
- as one may now estimate - no major new stuff will come in addition we may even
have the _better_ product.
--
Alexander Mai
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
