Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!spdcc!tauxersvilli!alphalpha!nazgul From: nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: (Yet another) OpenLook vs. Motif Article by (yet) an(other) Expert Message-ID: <1990Oct20.122332.5509@alphalpha.com> Date: 20 Oct 90 12:23:32 GMT References: <9010162329.AA12330@statsci.com> <1990Oct19.211209.23384@tfic.bc.ca> Organization: asi Lines: 74 >IMHO, it's relatively easy to decide the UI vs OSF question by answering the >following: whose camp do you want to be in? the one that brought you OS/VS, >MVS, XA, VM, SAA, CICS; and RT11, VMS, Dibol; and RTE; and AOS/VS; who are >now preaching the open systems line? or the one that brought you UNIX, and >NFS? ... >Well, how did X become a standard? Seems to me that a group of very competent >people without windowing systems and with kilometers of Ethernet cable got BTW. What companies sponsored that work? The ones that brought you UNIX and NFS? :-) >Again, IMHO, Motif may have been conceived as a marketing tool to keep Sun >workstations out of IBM and DEC shops. Think of it this way; an IBM/DEC Let me get this straight, because this pisses me off royally. I was there. If this was the goal no one told me in the year I was a member of the team that selected Motif. Got that? You don't believe me? Why don't you ask Bob Schiefler - he was there as a consultant. Did we sit around wondering how we could screw Sun? Did we decide not to take AT&T's version of Open Look because it was from that evil company AT&T? Let's have some facts, okay? At the time OSF started its process there was no standard GUI toolkit for X. There were a number of contenders, very few of which were actually released products and none of which had a noticable customer base. The marketplace looked like a mess and it seemed like it ought to be possible to do a technical evaluation and come up with something good before anyone had made too much of a committment to any one of the possibilities. In fact the process was at least partially a success. Now there are only two GUI's (well, one of them has several APIs but that's by choice) instead of a dozen. You might argue that if OSF hadn't made a decision to do this then there would only be one (Open Look) now. The world might be very different. Maybe there would only be Open Look, maybe XView wouldn't be free? I haven't the slightest - and we certainly couldn't have known any of this then. So. Maybe all the people at OSF are actually secret agents working for three-letter computer companies out to subvert (but wait, all the big companies have three letters! They're all part of the plot! :-) the world as we know it. But if that's the case they sure fooled me. Come to think of it, I never did see any of them in a mirror. Get real folks. UI and OSF are people just like us. And just like us they have a tendency to think they are right. And just like us sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. So cut the crap, because everytime you accuse them of being big-company stoolies you are accusing individuals who live down the street of being liars and cheats (or at best, dupes). And frankly, that kind of stuff doesn't belong here. Listen. Why don't we move all of this to talk.religion okay? I read this group to find out what's happening in X, not what someone thinks will be happening 5 years from now, and *certainly* not to hear how people think that OSF/UI are out to screw the world. On second thought, move it alt.conspiracy. If you want a toolkit to succeed - start writing applications with it. Otherwise wait and see. >Disclaimer: Written at a SS1 recently upgraded to 12Mb so that it could >run OpenWindows without paging itself to death! Now *there's* something OL and Motif have in common! :-) -kee -- Alphalpha Software, Inc. | motif-request@alphalpha.com nazgul@alphalpha.com |----------------------------------- 617/646-7703 (voice/fax) | Proline BBS: 617/641-3722 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.