Re: Proposal: Motif Widget set
From: "Julie" <jockgrrl@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 08:54:46 -0500
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.....
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.
... and this is precisely why the term Open Source is so useful. It has
a clear cut definition, which a majority of the community considers
useful. People can argue 'til the cows come home about whether a
particular license is "free" enough or not. You have your definition,
RMS has another, and the BSD folks have yet another.
Instead, the term "Open Source" has a very clear definition. Your
Shadow package violated requirement #1. Case closed. There's no need
to debate whether it's "free" enough or not. It's relatively well
defined, with a specific process by which borderline cases can be
decided. If you don't like it, well, you can either choose to change
your license, or accept that some people/distributions with Open Source
policies will choose not to use your software.
After all, not all software written in the '80's and early '90's has a
natural right for the community's attention. If the license isn't
acceptable, and newer software has a more acceptable license, well, the
old software has to adapt or face the fact that many people will chose
the newer software with the (to their minds) "better" license. The same
thing happened with both Motif and with DCE (even for propietary
software, their licensing terms were breathtakingly expensive for
software that was trying to become mass-market), and quite frankly, I'm
not shedding too many tears over it.
Considering that the Shadow license explicitly goes against all of the
distribution's business models (including Debian --- someone has to make
money off of making and re-selling the Debian CD-ROM's, or else no one
would make them), why are you so surprised they all turned you down?
In any case, this is whole discussion is out of scope; to the extent
that we have an Open Source requirement --- in fact, the LSB Mission
statement is even more specific: it's specifies BSD-like or GPL-like
licenses whenever possible, this is really out of scope. The Open Group
has said that they understand it's not good enough, and they hope they
will eventually go completely Open Source. When they do, we'll be
waiting. (And in the meantime, GNOME and KDE get better every day.)
- Ted
P.S. We're not spec'ing Motif out of any products; merely out of the
LSB standard. Individual distributions or computer resellers may choose
to distribute Motif, if they think that it would be useful. (And to the
extent that some 3rd party propietary software, like Oracle, requires
it, I think many people will.)
The difference is that by not including Motif in the LSB, it means that
we're not forcing all distributions to have to include Motif in order to
be LSB-compliant. Otherwise, some distributions that have strong Open
Source rules wouldn't be able to be LSB compliant, due to the Licensing
status of Motif.
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