Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!smoke.cs.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!moraes Newsgroups: comp.windows.x From: moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) Subject: Re: Xview vs. Motif speculation Message-ID: <90Apr12.013507edt.3571@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto References: <90Apr8.221709edt.3362@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> <775@med.Stanford.EDU> <1990Mar28.023719.13505@athena.mit.edu> <1600@riscy.dec.com> <1601@riscy.dec.com> Date: 12 Apr 90 05:36:09 GMT Lines: 54 >Any suggestions how the software companies should pay for >the time and money invested/spent in building and *supporting* >the software that you suggest be available via ftp from every coner of >the universe? I merely defined what "free" means to some of us. I did not suggest that anyone give Motif or any other software away. (Check back to my posting <90Apr8.221709edt.3362@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> again if you wish) But don't tell us that software that's bundled with a vendor's operating system is comparable in "freedom" to src that we can ftp or pay a modest distribution tape fee for. [I didn't say it was comparable in support or quality, either] I quite understand that OSF has to charge money for their source licenses. Membership has its privileges. If not, what would be the point of being a member. (We pay for source licenses for lots of software that we consider important. Or interesting. Whether we consider Motif important enough to pay for is another can of worms.) OSF deems it advantageous to their business to licence Motif and ask for Real Money(TM). Sun deems it advantageous to distribute XView src freely and widely, even though it forms part of their OpenWindows distribution. Both are business decisions i.e. risks -- I doubt if there was much altruism involved in either. (ok, so I'm a cynic) I assume the goal is to capture a larger market share by touting compliance with a "industry standard" look and feel. "Just so long as it's MY industry standard and not theirs":-) Some vendors say they'll ship Motif as part of their standard operating system distributions. When they do, we'll try it out. Oddly enough, that's exactly the approach our Lab manager took with a certain other window system, that was promised as part of a certain vendors standard operating system release a couple of years ago. (We happened to have a lot of machines from that vendor) In the meantime, a large fraction of our users got to like X, some of the hacks here wrote/ported/improved some applications for X, often in their non-existent spare time. The users around here like said applications enough that they now think of them as standard parts of X. If X10 or X11R2 cost a thousand dollars, I doubt if we'd have gotten funds to buy it just because "we want to see what it's like, maybe we'll like it and port our applications to it or write some toys for it". At least the battleground seems to have shifted to Motif and XView from X vs. "your favourite proprietary window system". Those of us that use vanilla X can watch peacefully from the sidelines, and enjoy the feeling of growing old with an obsolete GUI (or lack thereof:-) Mark. --- "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" "We must welcome the future, remembering that it will soon be the past; and we must respect the past, knowing that it was once all that was humanly possible." - George Santayana's "The Life of Reason".