[lsb-discuss] Motif and LSB

[Jeff Licquia]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 17:35 +0000, Dallman, John wrote:
> The distros we take an interest in at present are SUSE 
> Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise. Both ship it; SUSES 
> install it by default, and Red Hat don't. We tell the 
> customers to install it, and they are, so far, willing 
> to do so. 

OpenMotif is considered non-free by Debian, which will present obstacles
to mandating it in the LSB.  I can say with a good degree of certainty
that Debian will cease its support of the LSB if Motif is required,
unless that support is limited to the functionality in lesstif.  This
will likely have consequences for derivatives, most notably Ubuntu.

What's more, OpenMotif has been dropped from Debian "etch" due to lack
of interest.

For more information, see http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openmotif.html.

> I think our user interface folks would see recoding the 
> user interface for Qt as "overhead" work rather than 
> "sales-creating" work. Our customers tend to be functionality-
> orientated; when I talk to Apple, I find it hard to get 
> over to them just how much the "Oooh! Cool!" factor doesn't 
> apply. This is largely because CAD software is never used 
> by "business decision-makers" (aka pointy-haired types). 

There comes a point, however, when a platform becomes so obsolete that
it starts holding you back.  That point may have been reached with
Motif, or may be reached in the near future.

I don't think there is any dispute that forward movement in the Unix GUI
space is monopolized by GTK+ and Qt.  It's my belief that the question
of moving from Motif is a question of "when" not "if".

That doesn't mean that "now" is the right time to port, of course, but
it does undermine the case for adding it to the LSB.  Combined with the
license controversy, that may be more of a burden than we can bear.

Would it perhaps be helpful if OpenMotif were a part of the LSB appbat,
and thus available for developers to use to make their Motif apps
LSB-compliant?