Date: Thu, 3 Apr 1997 20:09:25 -0800 From: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Embedding Motif lib inside another lib (licensing issues?) Message-ID: <199704040409.UAA00644@hamby1>
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This question is a bit premature to ask, because the program I'm working on is still in the early stages, but I'm curious to the answer anyway. I'm writing Yet Another GUI API for X, but the difference is that this one is highly multithreaded and based on C++. The initial prototype will be on Solaris, simply because it seems to have the most mature threads library (and threadsafe libraries) of all the UNIXs. Afterwards, I'm porting to FreeBSD and Linux. Most of the actual GUI functions will probably map to Xlib calls (for font drawing and colormap handling, for example). But for buttons, menus, and other widgets, I thought the simplest approach would be to map them to Motif calls. Please, no comments about Motif sucking, I'm familiar with it, it does the job, and with CDE, it's cemented a place as the standard UNIX look-and-feel. On Solaris, Motif is bundled, but of course, on Linux and FreeBSD one must pay extra for it. Suppose I pay $150 for a copy of Motif 2.0 for FreeBSD (I already have an old MetroLink Motif license for Linux). Is there any way for me to embed the Motif library itself statically INSIDE of my graphics library legally? Of course, I won't be shipping any Motif header files, and none of the Xm functions themselves will be exposed to the user. I remember seeing a toolkit several years ago that was actually a server process that clients would connect through via a TCP connection, and the server would handle all of the Motif commands on behalf of the client. Because the server was a standalone Motif program, linked statically, and the clients only communicated to it, this is perfectly legal. But with my idea, where the clients dynamically link to my shared library, which embeds Motif, this sounds legally suspect? Anyone care to comment? If this is not kosher, then rather than give up Motif, I'll probably just link with LessTif instead. The promise of good CDE integration on the Solaris platform is just too useful to pass up Motif altogether. Cheers, Jake
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