re motif vs athena etc in article c k ny azj kirk bu oz au bambi kirk bu oz au david j hughes writes i am also concerned by this prevalence of motif particularly from the point of view of writing and obtaining free software as the linux and bsd communities grow however i think that motif will lose some of its grip at least in the non commercial marketplace ports of motif to both bsd and linux are available for a fee of about this is cost recovery for the person who bought the rights to redistribute the activity in both the bsd and linux news groups pertaining to motif has been high i just wonder if this will also cause a divergence between commercial and non commercial software ie you will only get free software using athena or openlook widget sets and only get commercial software using the motif widget sets i can t see why if just about every workstation will come with motif by default and you can buy it for under for the free unix platforms i can t see this causing major problems i think you will find that the active linux and bsd communities are populated by enthusiasts who would object to paying any money for software otherwise they would probably have gone for a commercial unix an important factor in the linux community is that source code is always available this is probably similar in the bsd community however i m not really involved there many people using linux like to stay at the cutting bleeding edge ie when kernel patches c library or compiler patches come out people like to rebuild their entire systems the prime requirement for all linux software is that it is available under a gnu style public license hence linux software uses either the athena widgets or xview individuals may write software requiring motif but i doubt it is widely adopted regards richard gooch
