Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 00:23:57 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball <anthony.kimball@east.sun.com> To: nate@mt.sri.com Cc: inge1questions@hotmail.com, freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: AWT with what window toolkit? Please correct me if I Message-ID: <13867.59676.952621.909497@avalon.east> References: <19981020004754.29188.qmail@hotmail.com> <199810200109.TAA08479@mt.sri.com>
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Quoth Nate Williams on Mon, 19 October:
: > Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that to see AWT
: > classes work you need to have the motif windowing tookit (or lesstif) if
: > you are not using a browser client, but a stand alone client.
:
: The JDK must be linked with Motif, yes.
I find lesstif 0.86.5 to be more than adequate, in the sense that I've
never encountered a bug I couldn't trivially either work around or
else fix. I know Nate is antipathetic to Lesstif -- understandably,
as regards the earlier versions against which the JDK was tried in
times past, but would ask whether this is on the basis of recent or
obsolete experience?
: > 2. Or is it the case that Sun licensing will not allow someone to write
: > class to a different windowing system set?
:
: You'd have to take up the legalities with SUN, but I don't think any of
: us 'armchair' lawyers would have any idea if you could distribute such a
: modified JDK.
As an "'armchair' lawyer" of the worst kind, I will opine that it is
clearly and categorically amenable to the JDK license to distribute a
KDE-based AWT shared library in binary form -- I don't know enough
about the Troll/GNU issues of KDE to make even an armchair comment,
however. Moreover, and more dramatically, I opine (off the top of my
head) that it is conformant to law for a JDK licensee to distribute
the source code for a such a library independently of Sun's approval.
I'm less inclined to comment on the issues surrounding distribution of
a "modified JDK", but I doubt that this is really of central
importance to the original inquirer. I can't really interpret the
original query literally, however -- "allow someone to write class to
a different windowing system set" is only marginally meaningful to me
and to the degree to which it is meaningful represents such a weak
requirement, that the answer is (what seems to be too) deceptively
easy: You can *write* what you like! IF you don't *distribute* anything
the probability of lawsuit approaches very close to zero.
Programming-wise, there is an almost-working example of doing such a
thing, libtawt:
wc -l color.* image.* img_* tiny* ../../share/sun/gif/*.c | tail -1
6061 total
It takes ~6kloc to implement libtawt. I'm guessing a good QT
programmer can clone this handily in two weeks, excluding all
social life.
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