On Sun, 15 May 2005 17:01:51 +1000 Colin Carter wrote:

Hi, thanks for feed-back. But no, I don't want to learn a new language, and my problem is just a front for a lot of number crunching, so I'd like to stick with C (without OO). Regards, Colin, I'm not sure what book you are using, but the OpenGroup has all their docs available as PDFs and PostScripts as well as already printed. http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/docs/ -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Sun, 15 May 2005 23:45:27 +1000 Colin Carter wrote:

Thank you for your info, and for the web site reference. I interpret those docs as saying that if I write, say a word processor, using these Motif routines then I must give away all of my code as Open Source. In the case of Qt I can purchase a copy and write my own code without having to disclose my source code. But X11 and Xt are simply free. I have not read the license. In general, if a library you use is GPL (or similar) your code will be infected and is OpenSource, but if you use the LGPL license, your code is not OpenSource. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

Colin Carter wrote:

On Monday 16 May 2005 00:12, Jerry Feldman wrote:

...

On Sun, 15 May 2005 23:45:27 +1000

Colin Carter wrote:

...

Thank you for your info, and for the web site reference. I interpret those docs as saying that if I write, say a word processor, using these Motif routines then I must give away all of my code as Open Source. In the case of Qt I can purchase a copy and write my own code without having to disclose my source code. But X11 and Xt are simply free.

I have not read the license. In general, if a library you use is GPL (or similar) your code will be infected and is OpenSource, but if you use the LGPL license, your code is not OpenSource.

Hi Jerry, I had a look at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html and got the impression that if I used this code (eg Open Motif) then I would be able to sell my word processor but I would have to give away the code and then anybody could compete with me by selling my product which I spent hours into the night developing.

Quote: When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom. The Lesser General Public License permits more lax criteria for linking other code with the library.

We call this license the "Lesser" General Public License because it does Less to protect the user's freedom than the ordinary General Public License. It also provides other free software developers Less of an advantage over competing non-free programs. These disadvantages are the reason we use the ordinary General Public License for many libraries. However, the Lesser license provides advantages in certain special circumstances. End Quote.

But if I use M$ software then my product is mine. If it is always going to be that way then why "bust your guts" trying to achieve something if you have to give it away. Sorry, but if this is to be the official line for Linux then it is doomed to stay at the guru or amateur level. How do the owners of Qt get away with charging for their software and keeping their source code secret?

When I read the GNU licence statements they all go around in circles arguing the advantages of open software without actually stating anything except that everybody has the right to the source code and everybody can charge a fee and distribute everything, even the code they didn't put any effort into. Sure SuSE cover their back side by saying that proprietary software cannot be distributed, but who actually knows which parts of the DVD are proprietary? They don't exactly supply a list.

Regards, Colin

I second the sentiment about incentive to bust a gut doing something original, then having to give it away, and your conclusion about amateur status as well. I suspect that is why the LPGL (which I never heard of before you brought it up :-) ) came about. I don't think anyone will come after you for basing something on Motif & selling it, though. You could buy a cheap Octane on Ebay (& IRIX ROMs as well, all legal) & you would be free to develope Motif apps to your hearts content. You could also claim that that's how you developed the app & I suspect nobody would be the wiser. That is essentially what I do ;-), develope on SGI's, port to Linux, & off to the races. -- William A. Mahaffey III --------------------------------------------------------------------- Remember, ignorance is bliss, but willful ignorance is LIBERALISM !!!!

...

...

Quote: When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom. The Lesser General Public License permits more lax criteria for linking other code with the library.

We call this license the "Lesser" General Public License because it does Less to protect the user's freedom than the ordinary General Public License. It also provides other free software developers Less of an advantage over competing non-free programs. These disadvantages are the reason we use the ordinary General Public License for many libraries. However, the Lesser license provides advantages in certain special circumstances. End Quote.

But if I use M$ software then my product is mine. If it is always going to be that way then why "bust your guts" trying to achieve something if you have to give it away. Sorry, but if this is to be the official line for Linux then it is doomed to stay at the guru or amateur level. How do the owners of Qt get away with charging for their software and keeping their source code secret?

When I read the GNU licence statements they all go around in circles arguing the advantages of open software without actually stating anything except that everybody has the right to the source code and everybody can charge a fee and distribute everything, even the code they didn't put any effort into. Sure SuSE cover their back side by saying that proprietary software cannot be distributed, but who actually knows which parts of the DVD are proprietary? They don't exactly supply a list.

Regards, Colin

I second the sentiment about incentive to bust a gut doing something original, then having to give it away, and your conclusion about amateur status as well. I suspect that is why the LPGL (which I never heard of before you brought it up :-) ) came about. I don't think anyone will come after you for basing something on Motif & selling it, though. You could buy a cheap Octane on Ebay (& IRIX ROMs as well, all legal) & you would be free to develope Motif apps to your hearts content. You could also claim that that's how you developed the app & I suspect nobody would be the wiser. That is essentially what I do ;-), develope on SGI's, port to Linux, & off to the races.

This is just my dilemma. Thanks for understanding. I need to think more tomorrow - it is after 1am here in Sydney and the old brain is failing... Regards, Colin

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Colin, I think (hope) your miss-understanding the licenses. IANAL, but as I understand it if a library is licensed under the GPL, then all code that linked to the library and distributed is also covered by the GPL. OTOH, that is not true of the LGPL. With the LGPL, as long as the library, etc. has a standard api and you are not modifing the library itself, nor the api, then your code is yours and yours along. If you do have to modify the library, I'm not sure what the LGPL says, but that is still a lesser issue and the LGPL should only require publication, etc. of your changes to the library, not the application code you are linking to it. I don't know about any of the X-type libraries, but the core C/C++ libraries for linux are LGPL for this very reason. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century

Randall R Schulz wrote:

On Sunday 15 May 2005 08:06, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:

...

...

I second the sentiment about incentive to bust a gut doing something original, then having to give it away, and your conclusion about amateur status as well. I suspect that is why the LPGL (which I never heard of before you brought it up :-) ) came about. I don't think anyone will come after you for basing something on Motif & selling it, though. You could buy a cheap Octane on Ebay (& IRIX ROMs as well, all legal) & you would be free to develope Motif apps to your hearts content. You could also claim that that's how you developed the app & I suspect nobody would be the wiser. That is essentially what I do ;-), develope on SGI's, port to Linux, & off to the races.

If you want to take total credit and profit for software you write, write it _all_ yourself. And I do mean all of it: the compilers, the libraries, the operating system, the device drivers, the utilities and every last little thing you use. By no means should you in any way avail yourself of any open source software. Then you can sell your prize creation for anything you want. Of course, you'll be left in the dust by all the other developers who are willing to abide by open source licenses and can thus benefit by the fruits of collective effort.

If you're such a Randian, hyper-individualistic "self-made man", then you really have to do it all. Take on _all_ aspects of creation and don't rely on any other freely shared work of others. You really ought not use any public resources at all: No public schooling, no public libraries, nor any access, direct or indirect, to any of the science and technology produced by publicly funded efforts. Otherwise, you're just another greedy Libertarian hypocrite.

Randall Schulz

Or .... avail yourself of software without the entanglements of GPL, which was my point ;-). -- William A. Mahaffey III --------------------------------------------------------------------- Remember, ignorance is bliss, but willful ignorance is LIBERALISM !!!!

On Mon, 16 May 2005 00:52:36 +1000 Colin Carter wrote:

On Monday 16 May 2005 00:12, Jerry Feldman wrote:

...

On Sun, 15 May 2005 23:45:27 +1000

Colin Carter wrote:

...

Thank you for your info, and for the web site reference. I interpret those docs as saying that if I write, say a word processor, using these Motif routines then I must give away all of my code as Open Source. In the case of Qt I can purchase a copy and write my own code without having to disclose my source code. But X11 and Xt are simply free.

I have not read the license. In general, if a library you use is GPL (or similar) your code will be infected and is OpenSource, but if you use the LGPL license, your code is not OpenSource. Hi Jerry, I had a look at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html and got the impression that if I used this code (eg Open Motif) then I would be able to sell my word processor but I would have to give away the code and then anybody could compete with me by selling my product which I spent hours into the night developing.

Quote: When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom. The Lesser General Public License permits more lax criteria for linking other code with the library.

We call this license the "Lesser" General Public License because it does Less to protect the user's freedom than the ordinary General Public License. It also provides other free software developers Less of an advantage over competing non-free programs. These disadvantages are the reason we use the ordinary General Public License for many libraries. However, the Lesser license provides advantages in certain special circumstances. End Quote.

But if I use M$ software then my product is mine. If it is always going to be that way then why "bust your guts" trying to achieve something if you have to give it away. Sorry, but if this is to be the official line for Linux then it is doomed to stay at the guru or amateur level. How do the owners of Qt get away with charging for their software and keeping their source code secret?

When I read the GNU licence statements they all go around in circles arguing the advantages of open software without actually stating anything except that everybody has the right to the source code and everybody can charge a fee and distribute everything, even the code they didn't put any effort into. Sure SuSE cover their back side by saying that proprietary software cannot be distributed, but who actually knows which parts of the DVD are proprietary? They don't exactly supply a list.

The GNU LGPL license allows you to build a proprietary product. This is why we have both the GPL and the LGPL. We have plenty of good proprietary products on Linux. Additionally, XT has nothing to do with Linux other than you can use Linux to build and run a derivative product. GPL would require that you release your code as OpenSource, but the LGPL and some other licenses do not have this requirement. I think you will find the GNU LIBC and other system libraries and header files on Linux licensed the same way (eg. LGPL). BTW: It used to be that if you built your code on a Windows system using Borland, Microsoft, or some other C language systems a few years ago, you would have been liable to pay them a royalty. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Sunday 15 May 2005 22:04, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On Sun, 15 May 2005 17:01:51 +1000

Colin Carter wrote:

...

Hi, thanks for feed-back. But no, I don't want to learn a new language, and my problem is just a front for a lot of number crunching, so I'd like to stick with C (without OO). Regards,

Colin, I'm not sure what book you are using, but the OpenGroup has all their docs available as PDFs and PostScripts as well as already printed. http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/docs/ Sorry Jerry, I forgot to answer your question re book. I have a lot of books, the best being Douglas Young's "X Window Programming and Applications with Xt" but the title should be extended to read ".... and Athena and hp Widgets" because as sonn as things become difficult he drops into using Anthena and hp Widgets. Regards, Colin

On Monday 16 May 2005 00:39, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:

Colin Carter wrote:

...

Thanks to Synthetic Cartoonz for help to date.

I have a direction dilemma and would like opinions.

I have some excellent books, such as Douglas Young's "X Window System Programming and Applications with Xt" but it should have its title extended to include "... and with Athena and hp Widgets" This has been my problem: although it is a book on Xt it quietly throws in a command like ... XtCreateManagedWidget("rc", XwrowColWidgetClass, ...) and I spend frustrating hours trying to find an include file which contains XwrowColWidgetClass Ahhhhh!

I think that I have to re-think my strategy: X11 is freely available I have Xt is freely available I have Xm motif, commercial, I do not have Xaw Athena ? I have Xw hp I do not have Qt commercial, excessive for my purposes

Part of my problem has been my faith in these books. They read well, but, in spite of pretending to be books about X11 and Xt they quietly use Xaw, Xm, and Xw and I struggle to get the same code to work on my machine.

Any suggestions? Regards, Colin PS: for AMD64

Part of your problem (& definitely NOT your fault) is that some of these books were written some years back by/for people using SGI's (for example) or SUNs which had Motif onboard by default. I think the OpenMotif route mentioned elsewhere would be your best bet. I am using an older version (as I mentioned earlier) with no problems. Are you writing code for your own in-house use or to sell ? That would complicate the decision ....

-- William A. Mahaffey III

Thanks for your feedback William; much appreciated. You are correct. Motif has been "free" and "proprietary" on and off over the years. I could possibly get an older free version, but I bought into SuSE so that I could get the 64 bit deal, but at the moment Motif is not free. I see my dilemma as being the choice between (a) paying for Qt (which is not so bad) and learning it (time consuming...) (b) writing all my own Widgets (time consuming...) It all sounds uphill for me. But I have been years thinking about this code and I really don't want to spend another year (unpaid) developing software only to have some young kid duplicate and sell my CD. I am 62 and too old to start saving for my retirement! Thanks for your feedback William. Regards, Colin Or go back to the hateful M$ and pay for Developer Studio and their new 64 bit O.S. (Yuk!)

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Colin Carter wrote:

I see my dilemma as being the choice between (a) paying for Qt (which is not so bad) and learning it (time consuming...) (b) writing all my own Widgets (time consuming...) I just read the License for OpenMotif, and it does infect your code causing it to be OpenSource. However The Open Group has an alternative license for which you would pay royalties. Curt mentioned GTK+. This might be a better solution for you: First it is licensed under the LGPL: "GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all developers, including those developing proprietary software, without any license fees or royalties".

Another reason, in your case, to use GTK+, is that QT is primarily a C++ library where GTK+ is C. http://www.gtk.org/ -- Jerry Feldman Partner Technology Access Center (contractor) (PTAC-MA) Hewlett-Packard Co. 550 King Street LKG2a-X2 Littleton, Ma. 01460 (978)506-5243