Free Software audit update

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 12:50 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > 
> > > As such I agree with Ralf that this is a
> > > religious belief, not about "free software" per se. 
> > 
> > It's about the definition of free software, (or about the definition of 
> > fedora):
> > 
> > * if the definition of free software is the OSI definition then 
> >   openmotif isn't free software.
> > * If fedora is only made of OSI compliant softwares then openmotif 
> >   shouldn't be in fedora.

> [*] It'd be interesting to find out why Red Hat added openmotif in the
> first place, didn't they do a license audit at the time?
ACK, dunno either, but I can tell you my argumentation:

1. RH-Linuxes are OSI-compliant.

2. RH doesn't charge royalty-fees in the traditional OSF/OpenGroup sense
(In the past, the OSF charged per time/per seat licenses for OSF/Motif).

3. To be able to link applications against OpenMotif, they must apply an
OSI-compliant license => All applications in RH/Fedora are supposed to
be so.

=> Non-issues to RH.

4. The "royalty-fee clause" doesn't affect developers working on
OSI-compliant Linux-packages. Conversely it actually helps OpenSource.


Technically, at time when OSF/OpenGroup Motif went open source, Lesstif
had not been close to be compatible to OpenMotif (It's Motif-1.x
implementation had been rather usable, but the Motif-2.x implementation
had not been much more than junk).

Seeing Motif going open, had introduced a real relief to all OpenSource
Motif developers and caused them to further on ignore Lesstif as
"semi-functional toy junk". 

Ralf