Gianluca,

Motif was released under the OpenMotif Public License by the OpenGroup (they own the copyright). Unfortunately, the OpenMotif project team does not have the right to change that license.

I have asked our contact at the OpenGroup to reconsider their license. However, I don't have a lot of confidence that they see this as a business priority from their prospective. :-(

Thank you for offering to provide some background to this issue.

Can you provide:
1. Some background in terms of this decision? (who what, when, etc.). The requirement that software distributed with the core software be under an open source license has been a requirement of the Debian and Mandrake distros for quite some time. However, this is quite a change for the Fedora distro.

2. What licenses are considered "proper". Do they need to be OSI approved or meet some other criteria? Just want to make sure I fight for the right license.

3. You mentioned an alternative? Are you referring to lesstif? There is a *very* significant difference between lesstif and OpenMotif in terms of functionality.

Although nothing can't be replaced given time, I am worried that the number of commericial applications that rely on openmotif (and can't use lesstif) is severely underestimated among many in the open source community. The problem is much harder than just deleting the OpenMotif RPMs and telling the world that lesstif is the real Motif. Lots of stuff will just no longer compile.

Regards,

Mark

1. The Fedora Advisory Board is currently (re)evaluating licenses of all software included in Fedora.

2. The licensing criteria to meet is outlined here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines
as (in short):
* OSI-approved license. You can find the list of OSI approved licenses here: [WWW] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
* GPL-Compatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
* GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses

3. lesstif, yes, as it is currently the only motif that meets Fedora's licensing guidelines.

Thanks for the clarification and the url.

The OpenMotif license is basically the IBM Public License with the annoying restriction that the software cannot be ported to "non-open" kernel operating systems. It is my understanding that this is the clause that makes it not an open system license.

I am worried that lesstif is considered "Motif" and a viable alternative to OpenMotif. There are *very* substantial differences between the two. True many simple things will compile with lesstif, but more complex (and interesting) applications will be missing functionality or not compile.

For example, the popular open source editor Nedit, has restrictions when having to use lesstif instead of OpenMotif.

http://www.nedit.org/toolkit.php

I understand (and don't necessarily disagree with) the philosopy behind the policy. But, there may be some very far reaching implications that might not be obvious. Although GTK+ has the mindshare among the open source community, and I know this statement is heretical, I believe that there are actually more commericial C/C++ applications running on Motif.

The OpenMotif Project Team wishes we could change the license, but it is really out of our control.

Mark

That's it. The IBM Public License is acceptable (though listed in the GPL incompatible section), the additional restriction is the culprit.

That is a risk indeed. But if OpenMotif has to be removed, there are not many alternatives: as a side note, one reason why the lesstif developers are continuing to work on it is because OpenMotif is not _that_ open: http://www.lesstif.org/future.html

Yap, I happen to have a couple to maintain at work. Anyway, the point here is that a new license is needed if you (or OpenGroup) like to maintain a presence in Fedora (I don't know about other distro's position on the topic)

At least I appreciate if you can push forward the issue to the copytright holders.

Thanks a lot

Maybe the removal of OpenMotif will convince people to contribute to lesstif again. However, except for bug fixes, very little has been done on lesstif for several years. I crawled through some of the release notes and it was not clear whether they had resolved all the 64 bit problems.

And of course, lesstif doesn't have any of the OM 2.1 (to say nothing of the OM 2.2) widgets. (Although not exactly the same, the difference between lesstif and OpenMotif is on the same order as GTK+ V1 and GTK+V2)

I also *believe* that key industry applications like Oracle require OpenMotif and will not run on lesstif. But, I suspect that Oracle users would be using Red Hat enterprise or SuSE professional, so maybe this is not a big deal for the Fedora community.

We are. There are discussions going on the openmotif development list. The problem is that OpenGroup does things its sponsors wants them to do, and this is not high on the list of sponsor wants. We do have one person from Sun trying to understand the issue. But I am not optimistic here.

Mark

The Citrix ICA Client is one such commercial application with a dependency on OpenMotif.

I note that Debian GNU/Liunx is also missing from the current testing 'etch' (due for release later this year) though this may be due to the orphaning of the package rather than the contentious clause in the license as while the license is not Debian Free Software Guildelines (DFSG) free it does not prevent us from distributing it.

Sam

Hello, maybe you already know the following announcement from the Fedora Project. The following is just a copy from their web site, and please check it up.
Please forgive me if I'm thinking something wrong. Thank you.

Source URI: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RexDieter/openmotif?highlight=%28motif%29

--- Original message starts ---
openmotif to be removed from Fedora Core (6) October 2, 2006

Per discussion on the Fedora Advisory Board mailing list 1, openmotif currently does not meet Fedora's licensing requirements 2. The openmotif developers have been contacted 3, but it appears openmotif's licensing will not be changing soon.

The hard decision has been made that openmotif will be removed from Fedora and the current plan is to make this happen by October 2, 2006, the final development freeze for Fedora Core 6.

Currently, the following packages in Core and Extras contain runtime or build time dependencies on openmotif:

*cmucl
*ddd
*geomview
*gpsd
*grace
*Inventor
*mesa-libGLw
*nedit
*xlockmore
*xpdf

Maintainers need to update their packages to use another motif implementation, ...

--- Original message ends ---