Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 20:10:29 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> To: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> Cc: Bob Bishop <rb@gid.co.uk>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Motif goes open source Message-ID: <391FDB25.D7FB808F@newsguy.com> References: <4.3.1.2.20000515080753.00abfd70@gid.co.uk> <20000515114002.A64473@cons.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Martin Cracauer wrote: > > In <4.3.1.2.20000515080753.00abfd70@gid.co.uk>, Bob Bishop wrote: > > "The Open Group, a vendor and technology-neutral consortium dedicated to > > enterprise integration, announced today that it is releasing the source > > code of Motif, using a public license, to the Open Source community." > > > > Full details at http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif > > The license seems to make it quite useless. > http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/ Huh? The license makes it quite useful, IMHO. > "Free for use on Operating Systems that are themself Open Source" > (note the blank), otherwise with something like a GPL virus, but (blank? what blank?) > incompatible with the GPL. As it is not an essential system library, > you may not link GPL programs to it. As the point about FreeBSD is That's because GPL is brain-damaged. It is, essentially, incompatible with anything but GPL. Even the BSD license had to have a clause removed (and I'm still doubtful if this makes it "compatible" with GPL). > that you can make it non-OpenSource at will, no essential system parts > of FreeBSD may be linked to it. We do have a lot of GPLed code in the system, which cannot be made non-OpenSource. Anyway, the license does not contaminate linked programs. It says so explicitly. In this respect, it is much better than GPL. Also, since X is a separate component, it would be no burden to distribute it with the system. Honestly, I don't know of a single BSD-based solution out there that would have had the least trouble had Motif with the above license been distributed with FreeBSD. -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org capo@tutti.capi.bsdconspiracy.org "I agree whole heartily! Who am I to disagree with a wacko like you?" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?391FDB25.D7FB808F>