From owner-freebsd-java Mon Oct 19 22:25:32 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id WAA07777 for freebsd-java-outgoing; Mon, 19 Oct 1998 22:25:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from poboxer.pobox.com (port25.prairietech.net [208.141.230.102]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA07765 for ; Mon, 19 Oct 1998 22:25:22 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from alk@poboxer.pobox.com) Received: (from alk@localhost) by poboxer.pobox.com (8.9.1/8.7.3) id AAA08122; Tue, 20 Oct 1998 00:23:57 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 00:23:57 -0500 (CDT) X-Face: O9M"E%K;(f-Go/XDxL+pCxI5*gr[=FN@Y`cl1.Tn Reply-To: alk@pobox.com To: nate@mt.sri.com Cc: inge1questions@hotmail.com, freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: AWT with what window toolkit? Please correct me if I References: <19981020004754.29188.qmail@hotmail.com> <199810200109.TAA08479@mt.sri.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.43 under 20.4 "Emerald" XEmacs Lucid Message-ID: <13867.59676.952621.909497@avalon.east> Sender: owner-freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Quoth Nate Williams on Mon, 19 October: : > Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that to see AWT : > classes work you need to have the motif windowing tookit (or lesstif) if : > you are not using a browser client, but a stand alone client. : : The JDK must be linked with Motif, yes. I find lesstif 0.86.5 to be more than adequate, in the sense that I've never encountered a bug I couldn't trivially either work around or else fix. I know Nate is antipathetic to Lesstif -- understandably, as regards the earlier versions against which the JDK was tried in times past, but would ask whether this is on the basis of recent or obsolete experience? : > 2. Or is it the case that Sun licensing will not allow someone to write : > class to a different windowing system set? : : You'd have to take up the legalities with SUN, but I don't think any of : us 'armchair' lawyers would have any idea if you could distribute such a : modified JDK. As an "'armchair' lawyer" of the worst kind, I will opine that it is clearly and categorically amenable to the JDK license to distribute a KDE-based AWT shared library in binary form -- I don't know enough about the Troll/GNU issues of KDE to make even an armchair comment, however. Moreover, and more dramatically, I opine (off the top of my head) that it is conformant to law for a JDK licensee to distribute the source code for a such a library independently of Sun's approval. I'm less inclined to comment on the issues surrounding distribution of a "modified JDK", but I doubt that this is really of central importance to the original inquirer. I can't really interpret the original query literally, however -- "allow someone to write class to a different windowing system set" is only marginally meaningful to me and to the degree to which it is meaningful represents such a weak requirement, that the answer is (what seems to be too) deceptively easy: You can *write* what you like! IF you don't *distribute* anything the probability of lawsuit approaches very close to zero. Programming-wise, there is an almost-working example of doing such a thing, libtawt: wc -l color.* image.* img_* tiny* ../../share/sun/gif/*.c | tail -1 6061 total It takes ~6kloc to implement libtawt. I'm guessing a good QT programmer can clone this handily in two weeks, excluding all social life. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message