Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!HPLABS.HP.COM!mayer%hplnpm
From: mayer%hplnpm@HPLABS.HP.COM (Niels P. Mayer)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Motif is a proprietary standard
Message-ID: <18270.631494208@hplnpm>
Date: 4 Jan 90 23:03:28 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Labs, Software Technology Lab, Palo Alto, CA.
Lines: 40


From: kaleb@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Kaleb Keithley)
> Or get DecWindows, which is incorporating Motif into their next
> release (or so I've heard) or HPUX which comes with Motif (more hearsay?)

I can't comment about DecWindows, but HPUX 7.0 is shipping right now and
comes with everything in Motif 1.0 except for UIL. (Excluding UIL was a
Good Thing IMHO, since it is offal.)

Motif on HPUX is definitely real -- An HP customer that is using my WINTERP
rapid prototyping environment for Motif applications (see X11r4 contrib)
wrote me that he received his HPUX 7.0 tapes just the other day.

> Motif (3D) will never be part of the X release.

I'm no business-head, but I do think it would be a good idea for OSF to
release Motif source for free for no other reason than to establish a
standard. Plenty of good technical work has failed to become a standard
because potential users are not willing to go through the hassles imposed
by licence agreements.

Another semi-technical argument for making Motif free is that improvements
to Motif, such as the addition of new widgets will be hampered. It is
virtually impossible to write a new widget without source code. The source
to a new widget will invariably contain sections of code transferred via
cut&paste from existing Motif source. Developers of new widgets may then
run afoul of OSF licencing agreements in attempting to distribute their
work.

I'm currently a bit stumped by this situation since I'm beginning to think
about the design of a hypertext widget that is a subclass of the Motif text
editor widget for use in WINTERP.... if I want to be able to distribute the
source for free, I may have to rewrite it from scratch.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	    Niels Mayer -- hplabs!mayer -- mayer@hplabs.hp.com
		  Human-Computer Interaction Department
		       Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
			      Palo Alto, CA.
				   *