On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
> I think someone needs to determine if OpenSolaris is compatible with
> "Open"Motif's constraint that it's only free for open-source OSs, and whether
> Sun has permission to use it for their partially closed Solaris distro (I
> suppose they might, since they have a license for CDE, and before CDE
> made Motif (and mwm?) available for awhile; but I don't know for a fact.)
I'm also curious as to whether it'd be possble for an OpenSolaris project
to depend on closed bits -- in this case, Motif. If not, OpenMotif would
need to be integrated, as well, and that leaves open several doors:
(1) OpenMotif could co-exist with the official Open Group Motif.
(2) OpenMotif could replace the official Open Group Motif. I suspect Sun
would want to ensure some sort of backwards compatibility with the
existing Motif.
In any case its an interesting situation, and I'm sure there may be some
obvious precedent for an OpenSolaris project depending on a closed bit(s).
I'm just not able to think of one at the moment.
Re: the licensing, that'd definitely be a concern, considering how Sun is
wanting to eliminate closed bits.
> I don't see any particular reason why you couldn't download the source
> and play with it a bit for yourself. I'm reasonably sure I have a copy
> of mwm somewhere, and had once played with it a bit and tweaked some
> resources to make it have the blue-gray of the CDE default color scheme
> rather than it's internal blue default, along with a few font tweaks and
> such. Once that and a reasonable .mwmrc are created, I recall it
> as being tolerable, given that one accepts the reduced functionality.
I'm in the process of doing this. I consider 'reduced functionaity' a much
better situation than leaving customers without a raft, let alone a padle,
which is what the current situation is (especially, with Sun Ray users).
> As for me, I'll probably just snag a copy of the last CDE binaries and
> carefully put them on top of systems that no longer have CDE, like
> some people (me included) have been doing for awhile with the
> OpenLook deskset. Not supported, but it mostly works (I even have
> some notes somewhere...). Or better, I'll cross my fingers that TOG
> decides they can release CDE code. Even if they can't release Motif
> itself, for me personally that's an ideological but not practical issue,
> since Sun will probably have to supply the bare Motif libs (and even
> headers, I guess) forever since most commercial apps still use Motif;
> I don't guess I'd have too much trouble getting the CDE code to work
> with that (or with OpenMotif, on OpenSolaris). I would suppose that
> if CDE were released, someone (blastwave maybe?) would pick it up
> even when Sun would no longer support it.
Yes, I've done the old OpenLook packages on newer versions of Solaris, as
well. The problem is there'd be no maintenance for CDE available to
customers. Even though mwm is a fairly minimal window manager, it would be
maintained if it were integrated or at least became an OpenSolaris
project.
> In the long run, I'd like to think that open source would do one of the
> things it was originally intended to: solve the problem of orphan software,
> and together with the combination of vendor and non-vendor package
> based repositories (that were well-behaved together with vendor packages!),
> provide for continuing easy access to orphans and even the opportunity
> for providing or obtaining independent support for them.
Many shops aren't going to be interested in using non-vendor packages. I
think it'd be best to make a lightweight window manager/environment
official as possible.
Derek E. Lewis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://delewis.blogspot.com
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