{"id":233,"date":"2010-07-22T15:43:45","date_gmt":"2010-07-22T14:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/?p=233"},"modified":"2026-01-26T12:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T11:14:11","slug":"a-lesson-in-software-licenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/2010\/07\/22\/a-lesson-in-software-licenses\/","title":{"rendered":"A lesson in software licenses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick remark: a &#8220;aptitude install ddd&#8221; showed that this package depended on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/LessTif\">lesstif2<\/a> which is an Open Source re-implementation of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Motif_%28widget_toolkit%29\">Motif GUI library<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the reader here will never have heard about Motif. <\/p>\n<p>Back when I started working with X, there were two competing GUI standards: OpenLook and Motif. Free Software (the term Open Source wasn&#8217;t invented yet) stuck to the basic Athena Widgets or (later) used Tk. Despite the strict licensing scheme of Motif some projects (e.g. the original Mosaic Browser) went with Motif nevertheless &#8212; motivating the Lesstif project.<\/p>\n<p>It could have owned the Unix GUI market, but it wasn&#8217;t compatible with free software, so it lost the battle for developer mindshare and fell into obscurity. Qt almost made the same mistake, but they were a bit more liberal in the beginning and as GTK took off, they had to open up even more to stay relevant.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, the decision not to support free software with Motif killed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick remark: a &#8220;aptitude install ddd&#8221; showed that this package depended on lesstif2 which is an Open Source re-implementation of the Motif GUI library. Most of the reader here will never have heard about Motif. Back when I started working with X, there were two competing GUI standards: OpenLook and Motif. Free Software [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-system-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":921,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions\/921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}