Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!usc!apple!snorkelwacker!spdcc!tauxersvilli!alphalpha!nazgul
From: nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Motif -> Open Look look & feel
Message-ID: <1990Jul6.142907.22733@alphalpha.com>
Date: 6 Jul 90 14:29:07 GMT
References: <9006291804.AA06484@flatirons.Central.Sun.COM> <1990Jul3.004745.7400@wrl.dec.com> <138275@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: asi
Lines: 73

In article <138275@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> sami@strawdog.Eng.Sun.COM (Sami Shaio) writes:
>In article <1990Jul3.004745.7400@wrl.dec.com> price@decisv.enet.dec.com (Chuck Price) writes:
...
>>The claim that OPEN LOOK is better because you can get XView free clinches
>>the argument for me. You get what you pay for. I'd suggest that Motif is
...
>Isn't it somewhat ironic to be using that kind of argument in this
>newsgroup?
>
>After all, the MIT implementation of X is also free and that doesn't seem
>to be stopping many of you.  Perhaps arguments based on technical data
>might seem more convincing than "My toolkit costs more than yours".

Support is the difference.  If I were stuck with the reference implementation
of X on my workstation I wouldn't be using X.  But I'm using an optimized
server from my vendor.  That's what Motif is going to have the XView
won't.

As for why you see a whole bunch of engineers suddenly making marketing
arguments (and looking pretty silly doing it), there are a couple answers.
For one thing, the toolkits out there are pretty primitive, buggy and weak.
There just isn't a lot to be said technically for any of them.  However,
given time and support they'll get better, and then we can start arguing
about technical merits.  Right now it's just a matter of getting enough
acceptance to make it worthwhile to enhance the toolkit.  The other reason
is more basic, it has become very clear (or should I say, Sun has (through
their success) made it very clear) that technical excellence, while nice,
is not essential to the survival of a particular product.  Technically,
Apollo had a much better system - builtin distributed file system, demand
paging across the network, transparent support for diskless nodes (plug it
in and boot it), graphical windowing system, system-wide editor available
in every window, objected-oriented typed file system - and most of that
was available close to 10 years ago.  Unfortunately, having all that neat
stuff is not enough, you've got to be able to sell it.  Motif has suceeded
in selling itself, and (here's the good news) it's not any worse than any
of the other toolkits out there.

If you want my opinion (can't imagine why you would), the biggest mistake
that the OL crowd make was going with multiple APIs.  Sure, you can argue
that it's too early to standardize on an API ("what about voice and video,"
they say).  But in fact if you don't standardize on an API then you have
just fragmented the Unix market even more, and the potential market share
of my product is now smaller.  What Sun forgets is that it is possible
to extend an API to future systems without becoming backwards incompatible.
Sure, it's not always the best thing, and if you were to rewrite it you
might do it differently, but it can be done (and as things move along, you
can faze in new APIs).  But arguing that it's too early to standardize
on one, so instead we should standardize on many is just silly.  That's
just another way of saying "Sun wants a SunView API, and AT&T wants their
own, so we'll do two".

This reminds me somewhat of the original X announcement, which Sun declined
to come to despite multiple invitations (well, actually they tried to crash
it at the last minute).  The reason Bill Joy gave, in an article he wrote
for one of the Unix mags, was that he refused to stand up there and state
that X was *the* standard windowing system.  I believe he felt it was too
early to standardize on one windowing system.  (Of course what was missing
from that article was the fact that the announcement in fact did *not*
state that X was _the_ standard windowing system, only that it was _a_
standard windowing system; but then, one shouldn't let the facts get in
the way.)

						-kee


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I'm not sure which upsets me more; that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.