Path: utzoo!censor!geac!jtsv16!uunet!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!bloom-beacon!osf.ORG!vania
From: vania@osf.ORG (Vania Joloboff)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: The OSF is *what*?
Message-ID: <8909141528.AA25245@osf.osf.org>
Date: 14 Sep 89 15:28:12 GMT
References: <8909131235.AA13992@fnord.umiacs.UMD.EDU>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 29


This message only expresses personal opinion. It does not commit OSF.
                  
OSF has to find a trade off between:

1) If OSF allows people to communicate MOTIF code on the net,
someone could finally collect all the code without any license,
and then claim the whole thing is public domain.

2) On the other hand, OSF does not want to prevent technical 
discussions on the net and collection of bug fixes.

3) There exists for MOTIF licensees a mailing list, named motif-talk,
handled by OSF. Probably, the OSF lawyers have thought that discussion
should be confined to that mailing list: if you have a MOTIF problem,
it seems you want to talk to other motif users, who are on motif-talk,
and that talking to xpert would not bring much to you.
Actually, someone complained recently on xpert, that it was not
the place for MOTIF discussion.

My personal feeling is that OSF should allow MOTIF 'fragments' to be
publicly exposed, as far as the appropriate MOTIF Copyright and rights
of use would be totally reproduced in the messsage.

The question then is what is a 'fragment' ?
Should it be limited to at most one C function, one file,
a fixed number of lines ?

Vania Joloboff