Date: Sat, 24 Jun 95 16:07:59 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: evanc@synapse.net Cc: jkh@freebsd.org, hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Caldera Network Desktop Message-ID: <9506242208.AA16015@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199506241646.MAA16942@sentinel.synapse.net> from "Evan Champion" at Jun 24, 95 12:46:32 pm
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> >I don't mean to rain on your parade, but from everything I've heard, > >the Caldera folks are Linux and GPL fanatics. I doubt that sending > >them a CD would result in anything more significant happening than the > >generation of a few chuckles inside the Caldera project. > > Maybe, maybe not. One way to look at it is that they might actually > like the product enough to port their application. Maybe soemone > could try contacting Caldera and "probe for interest". We might get > lucky. They aren't all GPL fanatics. Most of these folks are from Novell, Sandy. Let's see, Ron Holt, used to be 5 offices north of me. Brian Sparks was one floor down. Ransome Love was one floor down. Jim Freeman was on the West side of the building on the other side of the restrooms. And Bryce Burns was in the second to northmost office on the same side as me. Ransome Love and Ron Holt used to work for Sanyo/ICON, Inc. Nope. Pretty much, Jim is the only fanatic, but Its A Good Thing. 8-). I think they'd be open to approach; I was very nearly working there myself. > >> Or maybe the FreeBSD project members should look around and try to > >> come up with their own desktop for FreeBSD (maybe based on the COSE > >> desktop). At any rate, I think that the interface is where the battle > >> lines will be drawn and I want to ensure that the package that I love > >> is able to fight back with a competitive if not superior product. > > > >This is a fight I could get behind. > > I guess then we have to find some interested parties. Since COSE > already has a relatively well defined interface, maybe that would be > the easiest way to go. > > Probably the first problem, however, is that COSE requires Motif and > that is something that FreeBSD does not have (at least not out of the > box). I thought I saw, once upon a time, that there was a group > working on a free Motif. Perhaps we need to have a chat with the > XFree people; they would probably know about any movements in that > area. I was working pretty heavily on a FreeCDE; it's kind of on the back burner for right now. Part of that was a Motif clone library called Mimic. I'd say it was further along than "LessTif", even though I haven't been spending time on it lately (I got bogged down on type converters for manifest constants and bailed to work on other stuff, like getting a real net connection). I also have some initial work on a desktop using a modified "magic" approach (I generalized the interface into a library/vector system) for file identification -- much better than stupidly falling back on file extension. Unfortunately, there are some issues of drag-n-drop that aren't resolved, but which some recent publications will help with once they hit the bookstore. Specifically, there's protocol interoperability issues with "real" Motif apps that I'd like to see fixed, so I haven't done any DnD stuff in Mimic (Motif implements DnD by replacing the VendorShell widget class in Xt and inheriting behaviour -- that's why you can't use Motif and Athena widgets in the same program, for instance, since Athena also does this and one will win and one will lose). Give me another month and I'll probaly be ready to throw the code open to more general developement under UCB style licensing (some of you have already seen alpha test versions of the Mimic code; it's not significantly improved over the last alpha-test). I have three machines that I'll be working on to get running, and it will take that long for me to get them to a stable state after a one week vacation. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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