Re: Proposal: Motif Widget set
"Julie" <jockgrrl@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> This sounds more like cutting off your nose to spite your face than
> a sound technical decision. One of Stallman's strategic objectives
> behind free software (and I cite him because he's been the driving
> force behind the free software movement for nearly 2 decades) is
> providing "better" versions of the same programs and libraries than
> the proprietary vendors. Motif is a better version of Motif than is
> Lesstif. It is free enough to distribute with Linux (and if some
> distribution isn't "free", =they= need to fix their distribution) and
> that's what matters.
If you are citing RMS, make sure you follow his terminology as
well. If you talk to him for any length of time, you will quickly
learn that when he speaks of better, he first refers to morally, then
technically. To RMS, Lesstif is better than Motif, because it is
free. I happen to agree personally, but I would rather not start a
flame war.
> ISV's that are coding to the current UNIX standards aren't going
> to use a backlevel version of Motif. If we are going to attract
> =them=, the most recent version of Motif needs to be available.
Unfortunately, there is no *truly* open source version of the latest
Motif available. One of the guidelines we have been following here is
that we won't spec something for which a truly open source
implementation is available, or distributions which for one reason or
a another don't use non-open source code (eg. Debian) are unable to
comply with the spec. If TOG had *truly* open sourced Motif, this
would be a moot point. But, they didn't. They admit that they
didn't. It's in the FAQ. Given this, we can't spec anything beyond
what is supported by Lesstif, if we spec any Motif at all.
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