Re: Proposal: Motif Widget set
From: Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo <jkaivo@elijah.nodomainname.net>
> "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.
Well, I disagree with RMS's notion of "free" because it is
coercive in nature. As this is a religious discussion I'll leave
it at that. When I started writing "free" software 16 years
ago "free" meant something entire different and I've not
deviated from that definition.
> > 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.
I think we are getting into a religious discussion of what "open"
and "free" both mean. I've read the FAQ and disagree with
some of the conclusions. In particular, I believe that any Linux
distribution which could not distribute "Open Motif" under the
terms of the license isn't itself "free" and as such falls outside
of the scope of this discussion.
Ignoring the philosophical bent of any one distribution (such
as Debian's "we don't use it if it doesn't fit our private
definition of ``free''), is there a =legal= reason that Motif
cannot be distributed with the major Linux distributions? If
there is no =legal= reason why Motif cannot be included, the
personal philosophies of the people who put together a
distribution are their problem and also outside the scope of a
standards exercise.
FWIW this is more than an idle exercise. I struggled for
over a year to get Shadow included in all the distributions
because they didn't like my definition of "free", which at the
time was "anyone can copy/use/distribute so long as they
don't make money from it". This looks like a repeat of the
same experience -- some people don't like TOG's definition
of "open" and "free" despite it being a very workable
definition and they are willing to spec a technically inferior
product because of it.
-- Julie.
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