LWN: Comments on "Motif relicensed"

Motif relicensed

ortalo — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:39:38 +0000

Maybe that's a nice opportunity to find unspotted security bugs still lurking in good old proprietary software still running on obscure computers hidden in corners?
Well, I suppose most of the world is also unlikely to care much of that too, of course.

Anyway, there may be something still important in a such a news: the confidence it gives. We were right. (Whatever you notion of we is, I guess it's similar to mine).

Motif relicensed

mirabilos — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:55:34 +0000

I care, I also signed the petition to have CDE freed, back several years ago.

Not just for archeology, although having historic stuff available is great (e.g. in case of the 4.xBSD documentation and papers which the modern BSDs can ship since a while) or even useful (some oldish code to replace less free modern code also helped the BSDs), but also for competition.

Sure, CDE looks “different”, but, to be honest, what doesn’t, these days? When I first saw KDE 4 and Windows® 7, I couldn’t decide on which looked worse (but decided they looked alike). GNOME 3 is a disaster that needs no explanation (although I never liked GNOME), and Unity, well… is very polarising. LXDE and Xfce are niche systems and, just like GNUstep, look and feel totally different. So, why not CDE?

I might give it a try. Or not. But still, it’s nice to have the choice.

Motif relicensed

lacos — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:16:33 +0000

all the lesstifs that I had encountered in distributions failed to work with dead keys. (Ie. when you put

<dead_tilde> <O> : "\325" Odoubleacute

in your ~/.XCompose, and then expect '~' followed by an 'O' to produce 'Ő'.)

This works with OpenMotif-2.1.32 (in NEdit for example), but no lesstif I've seen can do it.

Motif relicensed

lacos — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:10:27 +0000

Finally, another NEdit user! :)

Dead keys are fully unusable in NEdit (or xpdf, or...) if the app in question was built with lesstif. For some time now I used to build my NEdit against OpenMotif-2.1.32-2_IST, downloaded from <http://www.ist.co.uk/DOWNLOADS/motif_download.html> (source is also available there, under the Open Group license). It works great!

Before I found the page linked above, I had been struggling with OpenMotif 2.2. Unfortunately, it proved extremely unstable, to the point that NEdit was unusable with it, and IIRC NEdit developers explicitly recommended building NEdit with motif 2.1.x.

The IST page linked above speaks about 2.2's experimental nature too. Interestingly, even 2.3 is qualified as such! Hence I'm not holding my breath. This licensing change may allow distros to distribute openmotif-2.3.x, but what I care about is 2.1.x. Distros won't pick it up because of the Open Group license, but (a) 2.1.x works for me, (b) I can look at the source if I want to. Good enough for me in this case.

Motif relicensed

zmower — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:54:03 +0000

Why do you think LGPL prevents use for teaching? The source is there and you can link to it without fear of catching the GPL virus. Surely it just requires any derivative to release the source so we don't get back to the same propietry state that doomed motif in the first place.

CDE and Motif

jtc — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:33:38 +0000

"Meh ... I found CDE (and its "enterprise" successor VUE) to be really clunky."

Well... - that's because they are really clunky; not opinion, just objective reality.

Motif repronounced

mpr22 — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:52:26 +0000

No, it's the output of leandro's conscious decision to use obsolete-in-Modern-English letters in his Modern English prose.

Motif repronounced

coriordan — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:28:02 +0000

Is that the output of some speech-to-text software that with a few glitches or is there a Motif pronunciation pun that I don't know?

Motif relicensed

ebassi — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:57:20 +0000

I cannot honestly understand why LGPL v2.1 was chosen as the license.

for something like Motif, which ought to be used only for code archaeology or teaching, BSD/MIT/X11 (or even public domain, at this point) would be a far better choice.

Motif relicensed

halla — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:37:08 +0000

Yes, that's a very good point you're making. Usually people are scathing about code dumps, but I've wished often enough I could peak into the code of something old and discarded. This is a good precedent indeed.

Motif relicensed

kskatrh — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:29:24 +0000

Better late than never? Perhaps.

Most of the world is unlikely to care much? I think you're missing the point.

Getting it released as FOSS — even twenty years later — sets a precedent for putting valuable works into open source.

And if, by doing this, it helps get something else into open source, then that's a huge victory for open source.

The other victory of course, is that now the source is out there, rather than being locked up for the rest of time. (Well, it was never locked up if you were willing to pay for a license, but that's besides the point.)

CDE and Motif

nix — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:24:59 +0000

Doesn't "enterprise" *mean* "clunky", or "clunky and expensive"? I always thought it was a euphemism...

Motif relicensed

butlerm — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:41:09 +0000

>Motif and Lesstif are not compatible.

Since when? I thought the entire point of Lesstif was to be as compatible as humanly possible. The shared library names it provides are identical. The ABI it provides is either identical or really close.

I used to run commercial Motif dependent software with reasonable success with Lesstif substituted instead. That is a pretty high bar for compatibility.

Motif relicensed

paulj — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 09:20:17 +0000

He wants everyone to ignore him, I guess. At least, that's the effect.

Motif relicensed

cry_regarder — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:49:29 +0000

This brings back so many memories. Cut my teeth in C++ back in 94 building up a massive set of motif widgets for mapping using Doug Young's Motif in C++ approach. Wanted to be able to do it at home.

Was a hair's breath away from ordering Novel Unixware with a Motif development license, when low and behold, I saw an add in the back of Dr. Dobb's Journal for this thing called Linux that came with a Motif development license for a mere $90. Ordered it, got a box of 40 something floppy disks.

Dual booted my Windows NT beta program computer. Four months later, realized I hadn't rebooted into windows in that whole time. Haven't run windows at home since.

All thanks to Motif.

Cry

Motif relicensed

jond — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:34:39 +0000

My advice: if the writer makes the reader's life unnecessarily difficult, simply don't read.

Still good news

david.a.wheeler — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:31:25 +0000

As a widely-useful library, it's way too late. But it's still good news:

I'm sure there are old programs somewhere where this helps. Most people won't be running them, but for those few, this is great news for them.
It may be great news for killing some software patents. People have been patenting anything that moves; Motif is unquestionably old, so any prior art in it would help.
Who knows, there may be something of value that can be salvaged from it - a clever approach or whatever.
If nothing else, this will prevent a loss of history. Since its code is widely released, it is much less likely to be lost in the future, and this makes it much easier to "resurrect" a simulated old system.

Motif relicensed

juliank — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 11:16:34 +0000

Don't troll the mighty GNOME.

Motif relicensed

jensend — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 05:09:18 +0000

It's true that if Motif and CDE had been opened in 1996 at the formation of the ironically-named Open Group, a lot of the desktop and toolkit wars could have been avoided. In the form they had then - which ossified and therefore is still basically the form they have today - they wouldn't have sufficed for long, but with the momentum and market presence they had then, they would surely have seen rapid improvement as open-source projects.

Even more radically, if Motif and CDE had been open-sourced in 1994, I think the world would be a drastically different place now.

Imagine copies of 4.4BSD-Lite (or Linux 1.1 + GNU userland) with Motif, CDE, and all the old unixy X11 stuff being available for free a year before Win95 and two years before NT4. (NT4 was the first version of Windows a lot of workstation people took seriously.) Lots of major commercial software vendors already had Motif versions that were more polished than their Windows versions all the way until c. 1998.

With free Unices running on commodity hardware with the leading workstation-class desktop and open source development momentum, the huge workstation marketshare shift from Unix to Windows might never have happened.

Motif relicensed

jwoithe — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:33:20 +0000

The later versions may have moved on, but some components of a circa 2010 FPGA development I rely on used motif and did not work if lesstif was supplied instead. I can't recall the precise reason now. In any case, OpenMotif 2.2.3 made things work so that's what I made available to that application.

It's likely that the current version of the environment no longer has this dependency: most of the components had been migrated away from Motif (to Qt I think), but in 2010 there was still one holdout.

Certainly the relevance of Motif today is extremely limited, but there are some corner cases where it is (sadly) still required.

Motif relicensed

bkuhn — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:11:26 +0000

Motif was one of the first proprietary libraries that I tried to chase a bug into (and failed, due to lack of source). It was part of the onslaught of proprietary software I had to deal with that turned me into a Free Software zealot. Sadly, I don't even recall what the bug was; since we didn't have support contract on our DecStations when I was an undergrad, I could never report it.

Of course, liberating code is the last bastion to rekindle relevancy, but in this case, 20 years late may indeed be too late.

Motif relicensed

jonquark — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 22:12:58 +0000

As someone who still uses NEdit, I'm hoping this turns out to be really good news. Lesstif has a number of bugs (like the cut n' paste issues mentioned elsewhere) that hopefully might be fixed by a free Motif

CDE and Motif

kmself — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 21:55:48 +0000

Meh ... I found CDE (and its "enterprise" successor VUE) to be really clunky.

mwm, for its time, was a nice window manager. Largely similar in capabilities to fvwm2 today, though mwm had the ability to separately specify window border color properties that, to the best of my knowledge, fvwm couldn't. Something I used at the time to subtly indicate active vs. inactive windows.

Really, none of which matters to me in the least.

Today's news is an interesting footnote, and may assist a few projects, but other than proving the point of the value and obviousness of Free Software licensing over propriety alternatives, won't have much impact. My prediction.

Motif relicensed

barryascott — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 21:37:59 +0000

I had code that broke badly under lesstif that worked under motif.
Lesstif did not implement layout correctly. But all that was a long time ago.

Motif relicensed

jl2 — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:48:04 +0000

Important because CDE has been open sourced, and Motif and CDE are joined at the hip. Remember XFCE was originally inspired by CDE, and that was a great desktop. Mofif and Lesstif are not compatible.

Motif relicensed

rfunk — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:21:49 +0000

Presumably leandro is a holdover from a much earlier era, much like Motif itself.

Motif relicensed

thyrsus — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:23:57 +0000

The Citrix client, and thus my employer (who requires me to use their Citrix servers), insist on it.

Motif relicensed

jonabbey — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:01:50 +0000

Actually, I'd argue that never is better than later in this case. I remember working with Xt and Motif back in the day, and it was just horrible.

Motif relicensed

realnc — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:03:15 +0000

Gnome 3 should switch to it. It would be a serious improvement. :-P

Motif relicensed

alexl — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:46:23 +0000

From http://lesstif.sourceforge.net/#help:

We are looking for help. Our copy/paste code in /lib/Xm-2.1/CutPaste.c needs some serious attention as it is likely the cause of a lot of trouble. Unfortunately the original authors of lesstif have moved on and the current maintainers are not up to the task. If you can help, please contact us via the mailing list: lesstif-discuss - at - lists.sourceforge.net.

Motif relicensed

ledow — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:42:57 +0000

One question:

Why do that to your text?

Motif relicensed

josh — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:18:05 +0000

I wonder, do any applications that might benefit from this not run with lesstif?

Motif relicensed

leandro — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:53:23 +0000

Back in ðe day, ðis could have prevented ðe KDE‐Qt licenſiŋ ſhenanigans & ðe need to create Gnome. Preſumably, it ƿould alſo avoided a ſeparate deſktop by Canonical. Noƿ, ¿is it ſtill relevant to anyone but Solaris uſers?