Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!sdd.hp.com!samsung!xylogics!bu.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!SABER.COM!jimf
From: jimf@SABER.COM
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Motif -> Open Look look & feel
Message-ID: <9007021559.AA00522@lance>
Date: 2 Jul 90 15:59:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 41

|	+DG, Digital,
|	+HP/Apollo, IBM, Solbourne, SCO, etc.... The only significant player
|	+missing is Sun.
[...]
|How much of the workstation market is DG anyway ?  Or IBM for that matter ?

HP/Apollo and DEC form quite a large chunk, I daresay larger than Sun.
Nor would I count IBM out (regardless of my personal opinions towards
the company).

From my standpoint, there is one major player -- Sun -- pushing Open
Look.  Every other major player is pushing Motif.

We market a product on Sun and DEC platforms now, with IBM and HP
ports in progress and the potential for several others.  Of these
vendors and potential vendors, only Sun wants Open Look.

We don't want to abandon Sun, our major platform today, but can we
realistically abandon *every* other major vendor out there?  I think
not.

Neither Open Look nor Motif is a good environment for developing
complex applications, and they differ enough that it would be
difficult to support a product which makes use of both of them.  The
lack of quality in both XView and Open Look makes development tough
enough for either (doing both is nigh impossible).

Personally I think that Sun/AT&T should abandon their UI crusade so
that we developers can get on with our lives.  If they instead built a
competing Motif library (or perhaps a merged OL/Motif) and put it out
there with the same terms as XView, we'd get around the painful
licensing of Motif and the moronic competing-UI problems that we
developers have to deal with now.

But that's wishful thinking, I know.

Happy hacking,

Jim frost
saber software
jimf@saber.com