Fedora house keeping

Posted Aug 24, 2006 19:21 UTC (Thu) by uravanbob (guest, #4050)
Parent article: Fedora house keeping

Ok, I'll bite. What is so unfree about OpenMotif aside from the fact that FSF doesn't approve of the license?

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 11:15 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

What is so unfree about OpenMotif aside from the fact that FSF doesn't approve of the license?

It can be used only on open-source operating systems:

2. GRANT OF RIGHTS
The rights granted under this license are limited solely to distribution and sublicensing of the Contribution(s) on, with, or for operating systems which are themselves Open Source programs. Contact The Open Group for a license allowing distribution and sublicensing of the Original Program on, with, or for operating systems which are not Open Source programs.

(source: clause 2 in http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/)

But I am too a bit puzzled why Fedora, which certainly is allowed by the license, would see this as too disagreeable.

About xpdf: If OpenMotif is weeded out, wouldn't it work with LessTif (http://www.lesstif.org/)?

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 19:29 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

That particular platform restriction in openmotif makes it a non-free and non OSI compliant license which is mandated by the packaging guidelines

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 21:52 UTC (Fri) by uravanbob (guest, #4050) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for the clarification.

It seems a distinction without real practical benefit (what non-open source platform needs the freedom to use the free version of OpenMotif and supports X?). Although for the Fedora packagers not having to decide "Is license XYZ an open source license?" is probably of great practical benefit.

My personal concern is a legacy application (obviously since I'm using Motif :-) that used to have major issues with LessTif - it could run fine now - I haven't bothered since OpenMotif became available. These 'nits' (defined as "changes without obvious practical benefit to me" are annoying when I have a huge backlog of other tasks.

Limited to OSS systems

Posted Aug 25, 2006 22:17 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

For one as pointed out in the article, Fedora Project has explicit objectives (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives) to be a Free and open source distribution. So its not merely a issue of licensing policy. The Open motif project itself seems to be not able to change its license (http://204.2.109.48/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3878#3878) at this point.

There might as well as be practical issues as pointed out in https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2006-A... and in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motif.html especially that the real benefit probably is just for commercial distributions which need to support legacy applications for ISV's and customers and they wouldnt able to do so with this license anyway.

For for Fedora developers and various derivative distributions (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions), the fact that the distribution would have a common set of licenses with known freedoms and restrictions and no expections would make their life easier as you have highlighted.

Fedora hasnt usually included libraries without actual applications within the formal repositories using them. The repositories only has about a dozen openmotif dependencies with xpdf being a popular one which developers are working on fixing and a number of them would work with lesstif, other frontends, some patches and so on.

If you have applications using openmotif and it wouldnt work with lesstif and there might well be a few applications in that category, your options are to provide feedback or patches to fix lesstif or the apps themselves to work better in Fedora or use openmotif from compatible third party repositories. Hope that helps.