🚀 go-pugleaf

Dave Sill Writes:

  Richard Stallman recently posted a request that FSF supporters avoid
  writing and using Motif-based applications on the grounds that Motif
  is a non-Free product.  While I wholeheartedly support the FSF and the
  concept of Free software, I can't help but wish that such support was
  not counterproductive to the goals of standardization efforts by the
  various vendor and organizations at work in the X/UNIX community. 

This seems to me to be a grey area. While OSF is chartered to foster 
standardization, they are not devoted in any way to free software.

If my understanding is correct, they are supposedly devoted to
selecting those software items that seem to be most accepted in the
industry, and incorporating those items into their portfolio. However,
in their recent "Standard Selections" release, there was one notable
exception. NFS was not selected as the networking system.

Now, at first this may seem obvious. Sun is not a member of OSF. However,
NFS *IS* the pervasive networking system on Unix machines (in my experience).
If OSF is truly dedicated to fostering standardization, Sun should at least
have been approached about it. It is my understanding that they were not.

Historically, Sun has not been hesitant to release their software to the
public domain when it seemed it might forward their own objectives.
(NOTE: the xview library.)

What is more, because there was no other PC networking system available,
OSF was forced to spec PC-NFS as their PC to Unix network standard.

Question of information: is the NFS protocol public domain? I know that
it is based on TCP/IP which *is* (It was developed for DoD I think).

The point is that OSF is beginning to demonstrate the proprietary traits
of it's major members (IBM and Hewlett-Packard/Apollo), and Motif is their
baby.

On the other hand, The OpenLook spec is available, and xview, an X toolkit
that implements the OpenLook spec is freely available from the X consortium.
Given this, it seems that proponents of free software should be backing
OpenLook as the GUI standard. 

I have not yet used OpenLook extensively, and the closest I've gotten to
Motif is HP's Xwidgets (Also available in the X contrib source). I'm not
deeply enough into either GUI to have formed technical opinions or
religious convictions. However, I have a strong motivation in the fact
the I can and have compiled the X graphics server on every graphics machine
I support (Suns, HPs and Vaxen), and have written xview clients that port 
transparently. When I can do the same with Motif, I might be tempted to
compare the two. If I'm not too firmly entrenched by then. If OSF wants
Motif to have a chance, I would suggest making ports to non-member machines
available *soon*, and free.

- Mark

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Mark Lamourine
internet: lamourine@draper.com                   "It's not my fault!", Han Solo
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