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X GUI

Motif's Not Dead 127

Posted by Hemos from the i'm-not-dead-yet dept.
Kailden writes: "O'Reilly has an interview with Antony Fountain, co-author of Volume 6B: Motif Reference Manual, 2nd Edition, in which he claims that both QT for KDE and GTK+ for GNOME don't compare to Motif (and mentions that Java is the only thing that comes close). " The interview's old -- but the response from user comments adds more to it. Yeah, I know the article's a couple of weeks old -- but it's a good one.
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Motif's Not Dead More

Motif's Not Dead

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  • Re:Dead? It depends on your point of view (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    However, you can get the GPLed Motif clone Lesstif [lesstif.org] It's pretty close to complete (It's at least as close to Motif as Mesa is to OpenGL). I expect distros such as Mandrake will include it as standard in the near future - the only reason you don't see it more is because RH don't like LessTif, since it pretty much killed one of their early profit-making schemes, which was selling a commercial Linux Motif implementation.

    I actually find Motif a rather well thought-out toolkit, if a little dated. It is NOT hard to program, and some aspects of it DO make more sense than Qt and GTK.

    Qt and Gtk fail to learn from earlier developments in GUI technology, particularly the dynamic, per-application themeability, graceful resizing handling etc. that happened on the Amiga with MUI [sasg.com].

    I also hate the Qt signal/slot kludge - they should implement it properly (like libsigc does for gtk--) for Qt 3.0 - I'd happily help, if my current employer would let me...

  • tradeoffs (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Qt and GTK+ are actually more portable than Motif, because they are NOT based on Xt. Qt runs on Windows and Mac, and GTK+ runs on Windows and BeOS (with other ports in the works).

    To make Motif run on non-X, you'd have to figure out a way to port Xt and fake it up on another windowing system... not an easy task.

    But the author is right in pointing out that internationalization is better in Motif. Hopefully this will be improved soon in Qt and GTK+, see:

    http://www.pango.org/

  • Why Motif is dead (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Motif is dead because nobody codes for it anymore. Gtk has become stable enough so that companies can port their programs from Motif to Gtk (look at Applix and Netscape). Gtk looks nicer, it's open source, and it's faster than Motif. CDE is just about dead as well, and will be replaced by Gnome or KDE eventually.
    Qt is good for companies who want to port their apps to and from Windows, since it's C++. I like QT better than Gtk personally, because I find it more stable and complete, but Gtk *is* pretty.
    Anyway, Motif is dead.

  • Motif, how crule can thy be? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I knew a guy once
    First day on the job
    O bright eyed young Programmer
    Straight out of college
    Such a crule end
    So crule
    Motif
    So crule

  • Yes (Score:1)

    by whoop ( 194 )
    Qt is far too easy to program, so I can see it doesn't hold a candle to Motif. Now Gtk on the other hand, it is much closer to the nonsense knowns as Motif.

  • Re:Yes (Score:1)

    by whoop ( 194 )
    With the recent collaboration [newsalert.com] between Troll Tech and Inprise, you can expect someday Delphi/C++ Builder for Linux using Qt.
  • No, the Netscape Communicator 4.72 is still based on Motif.

    The Preview Release 1 of Netscape 6 (which does use GTK) is full of bugs and mostly unusable (I was unable to post a software announcement to Freshmeat [freshmeat.net] due to problems with forms, that renders it unusable)

    Mozilla [mozilla.org] and Netscape are different things. Mozilla was Netscape, gone under heavy development, and now Mozilla is part of Netscape, but Mozilla will continue to be released independently.

    And the Motif trouble is not only on GNU/Linux, but every Unix. Until Netscape higher or equal to 6.0 is released and becomes standard, and all platforms replace old Netscapes for the new one (the 3.0 to 4.x change took a lot of time), it will still be around.

    Motif should be dead, we all would like it to be dead, but still has lots of strings attached, it the zombie will still be smelling funny around for some time.

  • The statement "Motif isn't dead" brings to mind Frank Zappa's "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" statement. I don't know if Motif is "dead" or not, but based on my distant experience with it, it's been smelling funny for a long long time.

  • >Nedit

    Amen. I'm torn between Nedit and Cooledit. Everytime I use either one, I get a odd sense of guilt. Also, the astromony software XEephem uses Motif. I forget the URL, but it should be easy to find.
  • "Indeed, there is no commercial GUI builder for Qt or GTK+. There are a number of private programs available, but as far as companies go, this is a no-no because it fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed."

    Guaranteed, just like all the "guarantees" you get as a citizen in, say, Cuba, or the "guarantees" we American Gen-X'ers get with the Social Security system. Trust Big Brother, he knows what he's doing.

    I'll take freedom and managed risk over illusory "guarantees" any day.
  • "Quick get my shotgun Maw there's one of those gosh darn Redmond fellah's at the front door again".
  • Netscape isn't a terrible looking application, after all -- Motif.

    Yeah, but they are moving to a GTK interface w/Mozilla. I think everyone understands that both QT and GTK look better.
  • Netscape isn't a terrible looking application, after all

    I'm using it right now and I think it looks absolutely disgusting; but that's just personal opinion... ;)

  • f you're going to write a program for a year, you damn better put yourself in there Obviously you have never worked for a commercial company.

    You spend 10 years writing code either for in-house use or a closed source product and no one knows your name. you write one stupid ICQ client and suddenly you're "famous".

    With open source, you get paid in recognition, with closed source you get paid in money. Last time I checked, my landlord wouldn't accept glowing letters of approval saying how great a programmer I was...

    There are a lot of programmers out there that for whatever reason are completely unknown in the open source world. Does that mean they have no pride in their work ? richard.

  • Let's not forget what Motif was supposed to kill (and killed, eventually) -- Open Look. This was a toolkit which looked much, much better and (at least with the Xview library) was a much greater pleasure to program in. Actually, it had, probably the clearest interface I have ever seen among C or C++ GUI toolkits. I have heard it is difficult to extend (maybe, never tried), but simple tasks like creating forms were really simple and intuitive. This was probably the only toolkit where I could read and understand sources _before_ reading documentation.
  • I am not sure what they did with the PC's. But I know that they were originally using Motif for their Unix versions. In fact they still are.

    I read somewhere that the Mozilla developers opted for Gtk+ over Motif. Too bad, because the Netscape people were planning on doing what was necessary to get Lesstif to run Mozilla on Linux. That would have meant free Motif for Linux. Right now you have to pay to get everything.

    I have a motif port to the PPC. Its pretty cool I use the UID/UIL tool to build the interface. (I have a basic template that I modify with a text editor) Its pretty good, because it decouples the interface from the code.

    Still better, components are the way to go. They have the potential to abstract programming to a higher level. Good news for Software Engineers IMO. I agree that this feature is a necessary part of any object oriented language.

    Cheers, -B
  • I posted a story here a few days back with a link
    to a rebuttal of the original article. Pity you didn't post the link Hemos! Anyway here it is
    again http://apps.cx/motifisdead.html
  • "Qt is good for companies who want to port their apps to and from Windows, since it's C++."

    So is GTK+:)
    GTK+ is also Python, Perl, Pike, Haskell, TOM, Ada, Dylan, Eiffel, Scheme, Objective C, Pascal, Javascript, and a few other languages:)
  • "Motif is just an absolute nightmare to deal with. Half of what you want to do, has to be done hrough Xlib or Xt calls anyway!"

    Enlightenment needed a file-selector, and they would've used GTK+, but they couldn't figure out how to make GTK+ and Xlib work together, so they had to write their own file-selector, and thus was born EFM [enlightenment.org].

    Is it possible to mix GTK+ And Xlib? If it's not, then I suppose that that's something that Motif has going for it.
  • Whoa there cowboy! Are you bitter or what!

    Yes, I am. You represent yet-another company that has written a proprietary product without thinking ahead to platform-independance and is now blaming linux for your crufty code.

    If you don't abstract it properly to begin with, or if you don't use a cross-platform GUI, that's fine, it's OK, no one cares - but DON'T go blaming linux for it.

    1. Our linux version is _free_ you can download it now from our web page.

    2. why do you ask if I'm trolling about our freedoms? Are you one of those open source people who think freedom is secondary to functionality? Sorry bud, not me.

    You are completely correct - you, or at least, the 'you' that is your company, is not an open source person at all. Canvas is closed-source with no current plans to release that source. That's free, how? Beer, right, gotcha. Not even good beer, as I have to fill out a stupid poll to get to the download URL.

    Sorry your company is lame, mine isn't.

    Nice one. :P

    Do you know what winelib is?

    Do you really think, after reading my post, that I would not know what wine is? (wine, btw, Is Not an Emulator. :P) And, if it worked under wine, why are you even on /. bitching about it? Wine is cheating anyways. Why even post to this thread if you're not actually implementing anything having to do with a linux API?

    I guess I just don't understand most of your post or your positions. You say you're all about freedom, the GPL, and open source software while being the lead linux developer for a closed-source product. Which is it? Freedom with the capitol F, or loss-leader-please-download-our-product freedom?

    5. As far as the GPL comment, I was talking about the standard API we, the linux community, decide on.

    There is no community, and 'we' don't decide anything. You use linux, or you don't. The people who 'decide' what API they're going to use are the people writing the software. Sometimes they use an existing set of tools, and sometimes they don't. It's that simple. I hope that there is never a single API that 'everyone' uses for anything in linux.

    --
    blue
  • give me a break

    X Resources are a cheap cop-out for providing source, for real customisability.

    But, if that's what you want... take a look at KDE 2's XML GUI.

  • there's no way that 99% of them have the ability (skill) to customize source (let alone that management is going to let them do that), but they all (in theory, maybe half in practise) have the ability to make a few simple edits to an X resource file. (And many of them did.)

    Well, then I was wrong. X resources aren't an excuse to avoid giving away source. They're a way of avoiding giving away source, AND avoiding having to write a decent UI. :-)

  • As far as I know every distro now ships with QT or gtk, so pick one and use it.
  • Please tell me how motif is slow. Are you still running on a 386? Please, please, how is it slow? I don't like the look of it either, but come on, your post has no basis.
  • If you ask me, this is silly.

    Why not just pick GTK+ or QT and stick with it?

    It's not as if either of them is terribly large. And as far as I know you can legally distribute them with your software.

    The QT 2.1 beta4 main library (libqt.so) is 5 megs.

    GTK+ doesn't take up more than 2 or 3 megs.

    Either one of them could be called 'standard'. Is this really so different than using, say VCL vs. MFC?
  • There's one major difference.

    Motif is ugly as hell. It's also hell to program.

    OpenGL is widely regarded as much more elegant than Direct3D.

    Oh, and with OGL, you don't have to pay a licensing fee either.

  • Re:Yes (Score:1)

    by irix ( 22687 )
    Amen
  • Fountain says, "As commercial engineers, we don't plug our own names or reputations with the software that we sell. There's nothing in X-Designer or the manual sets to say who wrote it."

    Well, that's because the corporate behemoths you work for won't let you, and if they did you know you made so many compromises and cut so many corners you wouldn't want to put your name on it anyway.

    But say, he does go on about X-designer and his boook. But he's not promoting himself, nope.
  • > And they hauled out pallets of Sun gear where I
    > worked during the Y2K adventure. Very, very
    > little of it was replaced with anything but PCs.

    And now they count uptimes in hours instead of years...

    --
    "The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
  • MOTIF and the GTK are functionally identical. was this guy on crack or something ? The guys who wrote the GTK were familiar with MOTIF enough so that even i can see the similarities..and i dont have much MOTIF experience ( i worked with it for 3 years on an IRIX box with C ). heck i could pick up GTK programming in one day just sitting down and writing code and using the similarities of the event handling style of motif and gtk to set up a working application.

  • WTF ? (Score:1)

    by ^BR ( 37824 )
    This was not supposed to get posted anonymously...
  • There is nothing more painful than watching someone untrained in the zen of the Motif file selection box

    LOL!!! I just got done showing someone how to use it!

    I use to be (well, I actually still am) a Motif programmer. I was introduced to GTK+ three years ago when I saw it discussed on the LessTif mailing list. I picked it up in a day and have never turned back. I'm still having problems getting it to work on AIX (4.2 don't have money to upgrade to 4.3) and that is the only reason I'm still using Motif. I ported a complex app to GTK+ in about two weeks. So right now I'm supporting this app using GTK+ on Linux and Solaris, but I still have it in Motif on AIX. Thank god for X-Designer.

    make World

    Remember, there really wasn't a standard when this was made. I actually like Imake. At first it scared the hell out of me, but after reading Software Portability With Imake by Paul Dubois (ISBN: 1565922263) I really do like using it. In fact I'm currently using it on a database project [goodmis.org] I'm working on. Yes, Yes, I know I should use autoconf, but I haven't had the time to learn it yet, and I haven't found any good readings on how to use it. Ok I've been too lazy^H^H^H^Hbusy to find any documents for it.

    Any recommendations?

    Steven Rostedt
  • So, you're talking about Amiga MUI here, not Motif.
    Agreed, these features sound really cool, so why
    don't you just help them hack these features into
    GTK+/Qt ?
  • 1. This man apparently makes a living selling books. He's probably never going to sell to the linux/Open Source/Free Software communities, but he can sell to current developers, and a little FUD never hurts anyways (oooh, fortune 500 companies won't allow GPL source code in? I'd sure better not...).

    2. CORBA bindings for KDE/Gnome/Qt/Gtk make the component issue a moot point... Or maybe he missed that paradigm???

    I think everything else I had a gripe about has already been covered.

    Cyano
  • Despite the clamor surrounding Linux and the Open
    Source movement, author and leading X/Motif
    software developer Antony Fountain maintains that
    Motif remains the quiet vanguard of commercial
    software development for large-scale Unix
    applications. As the native toolkit for the X Window
    System, a graphical Unix programming interface,
    Motif continues to be supported by major workstation
    vendors such as Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and SGI.

    Funny, I thought the only "native" widget set shipped with the X Window System was Athena ...
  • The orignal netscapes (2 and 3 anyway) used motif. And they were ugly.

    Spyky
  • Netscape and RealPlayer? Anything else? I'm not counting the porgrams TOG made out of Motif, though. I dunno, as far as I'm concerned, all I have to do is look at my current software library to see what's in and what's out. I see tons of GTK apps, some QT apps (I'm not using KDE admittedly), a few XAW apps, and two Motif apps, one on its last legs (Netscape).
  • I am almost positive that the OSF released the first version of Motif in 1989, but it is now owned by the TOG.
  • > I cannot see why having the source would increase productivity.

    The doc's are allways correct and describe all known bugs.

    Yeah, right.
  • In fact UNIX has retreated to the server side. Front-ends are written for people with Windows PCs. X and Motif are irrelevent commercially. Motif does smell bad - commercially.

    Linux is the Russian front: hordes of poor peasants with pitchforks hardy enough to survive even the Moscow winter by pooling their resources communally. But will that ethos work when the war is won?
  • In fact commercially UNIX has retreated to the server side. Front-ends are written for people with Windows PCs. X and Motif are irrelevent commercially. Motif smells bad - commercially.

    Linux is the Russian front: hordes of poor peasants with pitchforks hardy enough to survive even the Moscow winter by pooling their resources commercially. But will that ethos work when the war is won?
  • Doh! I meant "pooling their resources communally".
  • The last blow still remaining to strike is the move of Netscape from Motif to GTK. When it happens definitively, Motif is dead, period.
    That already happened; Mozilla moved to GTK+ a long time ago.
  • >I guess I just don't understand most of your post or your positions. You say <br>
    >you're all about freedom, the GPL, and open source software while being the<br> >lead linux developer for a closed-source product. Which is it? Freedom with <br>
    >the capitol F, or loss-leader-please-download-our-product freedom?<br>
    <br>
    Look, I'm doing what I can at a proprietary software company to give something to linux and to the open source community. I'm doing this while I finish my degree, so I can't really leave Miami, and there aren't any really cool open source software houses in Miami. What are you doing to improve the amount of freedom we have?<br>
    I started this project. I suggested this project. I researchecd this project and pushed and pushed the management until they finally agreed. And if you would try it out, you would see that it's very good product that lots of people can gret lots of use out of, in linux, for free.
    <br>
    And I'm not complaining about our code. Our code kicks ass. I'm saying that we need to focus on one standard API if we want companies to port their to software to linux and release it under the GPL. If you don't agree, and you don't like softwae written by large companies, than don't worry about it.


    ___________________________
    Michael Cardenas
    http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
    http://www.deneba.com/linux
  • Whoa there cowboy! Are you bitter or what! Lets cover a few things here...

    1. Our linux version is _free_ you can download it now from our web page. [deneba.com]

    2. why do you ask if I'm trolling about our freedoms? Are you one of those open source people who think freedom is secondary to functionality? Sorry bud, not me.

    3. Yes, my managers ask about API's. All of our owners are programmers that work on our projects and the director of R&D worked as one of the main developers of our linux version. Sorry your company is lame, mine isn't.

    4. As for an emulation layer. Do you know what winelib [winehq.com] is? It wasn't as easy as a recompile, but we had to modify about 1% of our code to get it to run.

    5. As far as the GPL comment, I was talking about the standard API we, the linux community, decide on.

    ___________________________
    Michael Cardenas
    http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
    http://www.deneba.com/linux
  • "We don't dislike Lesstif ";

    Are you speaking for RedHat here, or the group of developers that you directly work with? Just curious.

  • Can't they fix the damn file selection box? Netscape IS ugly, the select boxes are all the wrong size for any web developer, and if you've never run into the "aw, crap, I just hit a select box and now the text boxes won't work until I hit alt-tab seven times" bug, you haven't used Netscape at all.

    Netscape uses Motif because it's old code, written when there was nothing else. Anyone who thinks that Netscape for Unix was shipped by a unix user is crazy. If you use it for a week you'll find that it recognizes none of the common file extensions (tgz, gz, rpm, bz2, pkg). Navigator is usable, but Communicator will crash every 5 minutes or so. The page source option will crash on any page that's not padded with tons of newlines (and render practically any page with javascript in it.)

    These are longstanding bugs as well-- they have been around for the entire 4 series.

    Mozilla M14 looked good-- lots of improvements. I reminded me of the shift between Gnome .30 and Gnome .9x -- still some significant bugs, but some noticable improvements. Gnome 1.0 came out great (didn't really take that long either.) I'm hoping that when Mozilla 1.0.1 comes out, it will have the same level of quality.

  • Why don't company's do this? Answer: they don't want to pick the one the users don't use for their deskenvironment. You may have noticed---ooops wait this Slashdot---you probably don't know this, but users like the way applications hook up with each other and the built-in functions in Windows. This is possible because the developers know there are certain functions that can be accessed at any time. If you don't know whether your user is on GDE or Knome you can't assume anything. Except that it's a good bet half of the customers will call in with irate questions about why this function is available under Knome but not GDE.

    Of fucking course they are staying away from writing for Linux. And of course the one's who do, take the path of least resistance: they port with Winelib.

    If you have a long list of ISVs that have anticipated your advice and plunged ahead with either Knome or GDE, PLEASE APPEND THAT LIST IN A REPLY.
    They are waiting for us to pick one and use it.

  • Motif's Not Dead (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What Motif needs is a cool new name. Something like one of those punchy recursive acronymns. I propose to rename Motif MND. What's MND? MND's Not Dead.
  • GTK does not compare to Motif. This is absolutely true. While GTK is open and free (both meanings of free), developed by the people who actually need it, Motif was for years on the only choice for GUI programmers, who said "Oh, damn, I'll have to use that Motif thingie again.". Not to mention that Motif is not free, just the kind of software that sucks.

    Even Tcl/Tk is a better GUI development tool than Motif, and when we are down to that, it's time to say "Rest in Pieces, Motif".

    The last blow still remaining to strike is the move of Netscape from Motif to GTK. When it happens definitively, Motif is dead, period.
  • I've never programmed a GUI application ("Hello World" in Python/TK doesn't count), so I can't comment on the Motif API. However, I can comment on the usability of the end product.

    Two things stand out:

    1. The file dialogue, which I assume is a standard feature, since I've seen it in every motif application I've used, is horrid. Say you want to save a file using its default filename, in a different directory: double click on the directory you want, and the filename disappears.

    2. Pull down lists. For large lists, where you reach the edge of the screen, they just don't work. You need the patience of a saint just to choose the item you want.

    ...and then there's all those neat UI features in GTK that just aren't there in Motif, and I'm guessing never will be. Just off the top of my head -- TAB completion is a godsend.

    But... it all depends on your audience. At the end of the day, in the present climate, if you're programming for the Free Software crowd, Motif isn't an option. If you're doing bespoke coding for commerce, Motif might be the first choice.
    --
  • It's easy. There's this thing called buying.

    Yet more proof that we live in different worlds. I understand that you work for a company that pays you wages and maybe even lets you use company funds to buy software. I respect that. If I were in your world, buying Motif would be an option.

    Alas, I'm a poor college student with no money left over after tuition and no company standing behind me (not right now, anyway). Please respect that. If you want to give me enough money to buy Motif, I'll gladly buy it. But if not, please accept my statement that I can't get Motif, because it's true.

  • The GPL is extremely misunderstood in many places. People think that if you modify it in-house, you need to distribute your changes. People think that if you use [tool X] which is GPL then your software has to be GPLed as well. etc etc.

    They might also mean "Legal ramifications" as in "there's noone to sue."
  • I assisted with moving a satellite command console and some related software from Motif to Tcl/Tk (as an interface wrapped around C, of course; Tcl is horrible for writing large programs in, but it interfaces to your existing code quite easily with a thin GUI layer).

    The Motif code was ten times larger and five times buggier for the same functionality. Maybe you could write a useable GUI library based on Motif, but in that case why not start with Xt or Xlib and write something better? Or use Qt or GTK+, by people who already have started with Xlib and wrote something better.

  • Name 3 interesting open-source projects using Motif/LessTif for anything

    DDD, xmcd, xacc


    --
  • DDD, xmcd, xacc

    xacc is now gnucash. Development ceased many months ago on the Mo/Lesstif version (bugfixes are continuing, though)- the developers switched to GTK+.

  • Lack of support for the Xt component model is key, and is probably the strongest statement of the interview. His emphasis on "point [your] favorite GUI builder at them and they load just like that" is a little misguided, but the point remains: using widgets from another toolkit is impossible. Admit it -- it would be cool to embed a GTK widget in a Qt application. It would also ensure the freedom of choice that Linux users so strongly argue for.

    You can do it. I've done it. Just playing around, I wrote a wrapper object that inherited from Qt's QOBJECT AND was implemented internally using a GTK+ widget. It can be done. A library could be written to bridge GTK+ widgets into a Qt application. Integrating KDE and Gnome on the same system is a bit trickier if you want to use all the features of each at the same time, but from what I hear people are working on that very thing.

    As it stands now, you can run KDE and Gnome applications without running either desktop environment. I've run apps written for KDE and Gnome on plain vanilla FVWM 1.2 on one of my machines at home. I don't know why everyone goes on about there being no compatibility between the two. They just don't know what they're talking about.

  • Now try to fing a job e.g. in the finance area with your wonderful Qt of GTK+ experience.

    If getting a good job is your only motivation I suggest you bill yourself as a Java programmer - you'll earn more and probably get more projects completed than as an X hacker.

    If you insist on building enterprise apps in C then use a Unix port of GTK, or pay for the QT licence - you can afford it. Motif is certainly a PITA to program but certainly is certainly the more powerful toolkit of the three. One thing that I can't stand with GTK+ is that preferences are host centric and not display centric... That's plain stupid, I can access the same app from many displays and certainly want preferences specific to the display, what if one is small and B&W and the other large and TrueColor, I certainly don't want the same font size and icons on both...

    Thanks for pointing that out. I never noticed it in practice but I can see why you'd want that. I can think of more variations: sometimes I want my prefs to be specific to something very application-dependent, like a URL (just hate those sites that put teensy fonts on their web pages). I wonder how that could be handled elegantly. I'm sure we'll find a way.

    GTK+ completely lost the network part of X... If I want a non network centric window system I can simply use Windows...

    Err... no. GTK works perfectly well remotely - I was using it that way two nights ago, with the client running on Win NT no less. It gets this for free by running on top of X.
    --
  • Name 3 interesting open-source projects using Motif/LessTif for anything

    DDD, xmcd, xacc
    Nedit
    --
  • of sour grapes. this interview reminds me of nothing so much as the interview with the CEO of SCO a year or so ago, where he roundly denounced linux, said it sucked, etc, etc, and that sco would have nothing to do with it - we all see how that turned out.

    the sad, sick fact of the matter is that the crushing majority of new software for unix is being developed for linux/*bsd, and, because motif costs $$ (and looks like ass) - it's not being developed with motif.

    in fact, i'd like to label that entire interview as a troll. :P

    --
    blue
  • Motif is dead because nobody codes for it anymore

    Nothing could be further from the truth. There are more lines of code written for Motif than for any other unix GUI out there, and that's probably still true. Sure, there's a lot of Qt and GTK showing up on Linux, but all (well most) the in-house custom apps written for traditional unix (AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, etc) are Motif.

    When you're building enterprise applications that take years and dozens of programmers to design and implement (and I've worked on a few such in my time), you choose a GUI that (a) is reasonably mature (measured in feature stability for years, not months), (b) is well documented (the O'Reilly Motif books have been around forever. Docs for Qt or GTK is just starting to appear), (c) is understood by the majority of your unix programming staff, and (d) is well supported by mature third-party tools like GUI-builders, prototyping languages, etc, etc. To the extent that I've seen any move away from this, it hasn't been toward doing GTK or Qt on a unix desktop machine, but rather toward putting the GUI on NT workstation communicating with the main app logic on a unix server.

    Motif is neither particularly hard to program (GUI builders aside, it's real easy to wrap C++ classes around) nor inherently ugly. I find Motif far easier than Qt or GTK to program for the simple reason that I've done a ton of the former and very little of the latter; I suspect the converse is true for those claiming that Motif is hard. And I've seen incredibly ugly interfaces built with every GUI toolkit out there -- some people just have no sense of aesthetics or interface design. But it's also possible to build some very good looking Motif interfaces (and there are a couple of good books on that subject.)

    [NB, for brevity I include Linux with 'unix' above and include Lesstif with Motif.]

    [Further note: back during the original "GUI toolkit wars" (Motif vs OpenLook) I originally favored OpenLook -- particularly if using the Xol API which kept you 99.9% code-compatible with Motif. But OL really is dead.]

  • X Resources are a cheap cop-out for providing source, for real customisability

    Not a cop-out at all. To take a personal example, when I rolled out a (in-house) app to a couple of hundred users, there's no way that 99% of them have the ability (skill) to customize source (let alone that management is going to let them do that), but they all (in theory, maybe half in practise) have the ability to make a few simple edits to an X resource file. (And many of them did.)

    Could I have added user-customization as part of the program (ie preferences settings, etc)? Sure, if I'd been allowed to take twice the time to complete the project (a smart GUI front end to a legacy app for designing high speed copper telco circuits). That wasn't an option, getting the needed application functionality in there was the important thing, customizabilty via resources was just a bonus that came free with using Motif.

    (BTW, the app had to run on a Pyramid, with folks using their Sparcstations as X terminals to this particular app. Has Qt or GTK been ported to the Pyramid yet?)

    take a look at KDE2's XML GUI

    That's a nice approach, and not necessarily restricted to any particular GUI toolkit. But I expect it will be a while before anyone planning a multi-hundred-thousand-(or million)-dollar enterprise project makes it a critical component. (Just as a ballpark, the above project from start to rollout was probably in the $300,000 range, including design, coding, QA, documentation, and trainging the users (not counting salary for the users while in training))
  • Which is to say, the Motif API and functionality can be had for free via Lesstif. If you want the honest-to-god Motif reference implementation from X/Open, that costs.

    That said, your first pararaph is indisputable (at least, I won't dispute it. Anything is disputable here on /.) A lot of unix/Motif programmers are discovering Linux/Lesstif, and the skill set ports very nicely, but you raise good points in your second paragraph. I wouldn't say the nails are quite in the coffin, but the developer certainly has more choice now than in the days when the only real choice was Motif (given that the alternatives were a dying OpenLook or lame raw Xlib. I've worked on X GUIs back in the days before Motif (on X10), so we rolled our own inhouse menu languages and forms languages. Motif was a godsend.)
  • > He's latched on to some features that Motif has that haven't been fully realized in Qt or GTK+ and makes it seem as if these are the only ones that matter.

    That is, of course, standard rhetorical practice in arguments over whose software is best. (And lots of fun if you can watch the argument evolve over time as the "inferior" software picks up those missing features, and the standard of comparison is perforce redefined.)

    > It makes no sense to use Motif when GTK+ apps will work better on Linux and be fully portable.

    To get a feel for the rate of GTK+ application development, visit the GTK+ news page [gtk.org].

    Granted, many of the entries are just new versions of existing applications, so it doesn't necessarily mean that we're averaging 1.7 entirely new GTK+ applications per day.

    I presume the behavior of Qt is similar.

    We seem to be in a positive feedback loop. Linux and *BSD prosper because GTK+ and Qt are feeding in new applications, and new applications are being created because Linux and *BSD are prospering. I think I have seen an acceleration even in the short time that I have been watching.

    > Pango, for example, addresses the internationalization issues and is real software. It's not finished, but it's far from being vapour.

    I don't know what the actual status is, but I have read a post on a mailing list by a developer who was shown a preview (prototype?) of a GTK+ 1.4 text widget displaying multilingual text, including the so-called "bidirectional languages", displayed together in a single widget. The post was 4-6 weeks ago.

    --
  • > They might also mean "Legal ramifications" as in "there's noone to sue."

    Ah, but the SIGs pushing UCITA are doing their darndest to level that part of the playing field, too!

    --
  • > Qt and Gtk fail to learn from earlier developments in GUI technology, particularly the dynamic, per-application themeability,

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that all GTK+ needs for per-application themability is to have the application call the parse routine on a per-application resource file.

    > graceful resizing handling

    Could you explain this? I haven't seen enough Motif applications to know what difference you are refering to.

    --
  • > Anyway, Motif is dead.

    You've inspired me to define a litmus test for determining when an existing proprietary system is no longer relevant:
    When the champion of an existing proprietary system publishes an article claiming that the Open Source alternative is immature, disfunctional, unmaintained, untrusted, and already dying out, and a quick survey of the facts tells you otherwise, then you know that that existing proprietary system has reached the end of its useful life.

    --
  • We seem to be in a positive feedback loop. Linux and *BSD prosper because GTK+ and Qt are feeding in new applications, and new applications are being created because Linux and *BSD are prospering. I think I have seen an acceleration even in the short time that I have been watching.

    You hit the nail on the head. That is PRECISELY why Open Source works. I do some cool shit, you like it, you make cool shit from it, meanwhile I look at your cool shit, and boom! In no time, lots of cool shit abounds.

    I remember first trying KDE 1.0 waaaaay back a little over a year ago when Linux 2.2 was just being released (I think I ran 2.2.2 at the time). I had come from a long heritage of FVWM95 and all the old, ugly, hard to use apps from the ancient Motif/Xt/etc.. days. Things were bleak...then I tried KDE. My use of GNOME soon followed, and now I make heavy use of both environments.

    Look where we are today, ~15 months later. 2 completely usable desktop environments, with a wealth of nice looking apps that do what I want them to. Konqueror is just on the horizon, along with KOffice and Evolution for GNOME (along with that filemanager thing that somehow managed to get loads of press.)

    Where has Motif been in the last 15 months? Where has Motif been in the last 3 years? Sitting behind a committee trying to make money from licensing fees.

    Face it....Motif IS dead. In another year Qt and/or GTK+ will be the standards for UNIX desktop development.

    Motif vs GTK+/Qt is a case-study in why open source development kicking proprietary software's ass if I ever saw one.
  • As much as I dislike the visual and programming aspects of Motif you must admit the guys right when he says every time a software application come out using Motif we don't hear about it. Why? Cause all the apps are hardcore apps like Data Aquisition, Medical apps, Graphics, Testing. I mean at work I pick up a magazine on test and mesaurments and every single screenshot of a myriad of apps are all Motif. I think it's cause Motif has a reputation and is tried and true. Slowly however companies are seeing the light and using Qt/Gtk....it'll take time guys. Hang in there!
  • 2. make World is standard.

    Yeah, even God did *that* on the first day!

    Thimo
    --

  • After the first few paragraphs, I assumed the author was just spouting off about Qt and GTK, but upon further reading, I realized that he had a lot of valid points. He seems to be suffering from the Microsoft-esque "If it's not commercial who's going to support it?" line of (faulty) reasoning, but many of the points he raises are significant, and should be heeded by GTK and Qt developers.

    Most of what he says comes down to the relative levels of maturity of the toolkits. Of course Motif is going to be more full featured; it's been around for a dozen or so years. I think I'd be pertty disappointed if it wasn't more full featured than 2-year-old GTK.

    Lack of support for the Xt component model is key, and is probably the strongest statement of the interview. His emphasis on "point [your] favorite GUI builder at them and they load just like that" is a little misguided, but the point remains: using widgets from another toolkit is impossible. Admit it -- it would be cool to embed a GTK widget in a Qt application. It would also ensure the freedom of choice that Linux users so strongly argue for.

    I wish the interviewer had asked him why the Motif developers version costs so $!@#!$ much, and if they were worried about the Free nature of Qt and GTK. I would not be surprised if the timing of this book had something to do with the fact that more and more apps are getting written with Qt and GTK, and that Motif has a bad wrap in the Free Software community, a community whose opinions are getting more and more significant.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • Ok, i love motif and all, but it doesnt go along with open source, I understand the open group wants cash. I believe that open source is the way to go as far as development, It took me about 3 months to learn C and 2 of that was just finding a compiler, (i got linux, no fruit luvin windows compiler). Anyway, i would love to see motif become open source, so it could be increased in productivity and life as far as programming in unix/linux/other, would be much easier, i think that this is somewhat like the really old programmers that would not share their tips in progrmming for free, however its people like linus that got us out of that age.
  • True, I have never worked for a commercial company. But take a look at many of the commercial products. MS apps have all kinds of cool credits, game developers talk with the community through plan files and other mediums, the BeOS developers are a colorful group of characters who put a great deal of pride into their work. The windows developers all have their names on it as do the DirectX developers, and the Truespace developers, ad nauseum. By not putting yourself into any project, you will not do your best work on that project. You can bet that the guys that developed QNX or whatever are proud of their work. Even the various Unicies have colorful characters behind them.
  • I believe the original poster was referring to Nautilus, the GNOME file manager in development, which will embed Mozilla for viewing web pages. So one particular implementation of it is moving toward GTK.
    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • According to the link given and looking up Dux Software, there SimCity for linux. The tarball for it has a datestamp of 1995!!!

    They sell it nodelocked (WTF!?!?!), and at a price that makes you wince:

    Single NodeLocked: $49.95
    NodeLocked Multi Player: $69.95
    Floating Single: $89.95
    Floating Multi Player: $99.95

    But its been out there for 5 years! Does this make it the first commercial game for Linux?

    Only problem (other than the price) is that it needs either a 1-bit or 8-bit display.. I guess you can't have everything.

    So get it today, www.dux.com!
  • 1. The Open Group do not write Xfree.
    1 1/2: I don't think TOG is writing much of anything.
    2. make World is standard.
    3. make does not compile everything. Remember that site dependant install file you were supposed to edit? That's what determines what is compiled.

    I agree that the Imakefile stragedy bit, but hey! Even Meatloaf would agree 1 out of 3 1/2 ain't bad..
  • Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects do not marry well with open source public announcements. The essential nature of commercial software is anonymity. As commercial engineers, we don't plug our own names or reputations with the software that we sell. There's nothing in X-Designer or the manual sets to say who wrote it.

    I think what this guy is talking about is in-house software written for companies, not commercially sold software. In-house engineers often don't want their name stuck on crap software that doesn't see the light of day. That way, once they leave, the company won't be able to try to drag them back into the project as "consultants".

  • I probably shouldn't be contributing to this tangent, but just to set the record state, Mozilla is not moving to a GTK interface. In fact, it's moving away from it.

    Mozilla uses a brand-new, cross-platform toolkit (important buzzwords: XPFE [mozilla.org] and XUL [xml.com]) that's rendered and scripted, more or less, by the same machinery that renders and scripts web page content.

    Granted, under Linux, GTK is currently used to actually draw pixels on the screen, but it's used, more or less, the same way other toolkits use Xlib. Dialog boxes, scrollbars, and geometry management are all implemented in cross-platform toolkit code, and GTK just draw lines, rectangles, and pixmaps, really. For the most part, it just gets in the way, since GTK has different ideas than XPFE about geometry management, styles, and even which widgets should get which events.

    Say, maybe this is on-topic! In an ideal world, there.is.only.xul, and GTK, Qt, and Motif are all obsolete. You pick a XUL rendering engine of your choice, tweak your style sheets and pixmaps as needed, and hack away at the totally scriptable GUIs boasted by all your K-RAD XUL APPS. <BL1NK>3l33t h4x0rs 43v3r!!!</BL1NK>

  • Check the layout managers in Qt 2.* - they do just what you're talking about.
    Yes, you can write Qt and Gtk programs that have real problems with resizing (if you don't use Q*Layout) - but you don't need to.
  • Officially: Neither - I speak just for myself.

    Inofficially: I hear what everyone is saying, so I can say that this is true for both the developers and Red Hat in general.
  • first of all, motif is not ugly when done right.

    Ok, give me an example. I have access to a machine with Motif. Give me a link with the source of a program that looks nice and I will see for myself

    netscape has a pleasant appearance;

    What? You are shitting me right? Netscape is ugly. I hate it with a passion. One of the reasons why I use Mozilla so much is becuase I can stand looking at it. You are right, netscape doesn't crash that much but it is one horrifically ugly program and this Motif's fault. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I find Motif's widgets uglier then road kill on a hot day.
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • GTK+ doesn't come with any corporate support, but I sure hope that QT does with that kind of price tag.



    He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
  • Someone put up a response to the article, http://apps.cx/motifisdead.html
  • just out of curiosity, does it embarass you to go off on a completely off-topic tirade?

    first of all, motif is not ugly when done right. netscape has a pleasant appearance; it's functional issues are netscape bugs, not Motif. if you don't realize how shitty the logic is in your reply, well, i'm not suprised.

    there are third party file selectors that are much better. i agree i don't like the standard one, but that is neither here nor there. the actual look of most Motif projects is bad -- not because of Motif, but a failure of the programmer to understand the resources.

    i will never understand how someone like you can read a post about Motif and go off on some bizarre tangent about Netscape's bugs.

    communicator does not crash in 3 minutes -- it will, however, crash every time it hits a web page with one of several well-known netscape bombs. once again, absolutely nothing to do with Motif.
  • thanks, i verified motif was developed in 1989, although i am not sure it was released in that year (per Kenton Lee's Motif FAQ).

    win 3.0 was released in 1990, and 3.1 in 1992 (per the timeline on the M$.com website).

    thx,
    S.D.
  • I don't know much about Motif from the developers viewpoint, but Motif has got to be one of the ugliest maintained GUI's available.

  • Hi Michael!

    This is a huge problem for linux. We need a standard API for companies to seriously be able to develop software in linux.

    Linux has a lot of problems, and this is not a member of that set. Strictly speaking, X is not part of linux. You might mean, "We had some problems getting our product to work in a linux environment," but I would appreciate if you would say that. It would be one thing if you were Netscape, and not some extreme late-comer with a high priced product. I disagree that having companies develop seriously for linux is any particular help (see: jouraling file systems, web servers, the OS itself), but, let me see if I can offer some solutions.

    You can: buy a copy of.. MOTIF! [opennc.org]

    Or you can use GTK, (which runs on unix, windows, and beos) or Qt, (runs on unix and windows). As someone else pointed out, any distro that has X is prolly gonna include both of these toolkits.

    Also, you fail to mention which sort of API you're looking for, but I'm assuming the gui-toolkit kind of thing. Please clarify a little if I'm wrong.

    To preserve our freedoms by convincing corporations to free their software, we need to have a unified, standard, rock solid API for developing large scale applications.

    Are you just trolling here? :P

    way to implement Canvas, so of course they asked me about the API. The response - that there is no really standard XFree86 api that is supported by the linx community

    Now I know this is a troll. Management asked you about an API? Uh uh, no way. Managers don't ask about things like APIs. :P And, duh, giving them the response 'there isn't one' is dumb on two counts. Dumb one, because it's just plain false - you can certainly use the athena widget set if you need guaranteed compliance, and dumb two because, even if it was true, you coulda just lied about it. Lucky for you, it wasn't true, just wrong.

    ut, if we could've gone straight into the API and began hacking away, I'm sure those months could've been spent porting to a native app.

    Look, are you suggesting that porting something from the MSFC to X should be as easy as a recompile? I mean, aren't you ignoring the fact that what you're REALLY facing is not 'lack of a standard linux/X api" but rather "the quagmire of bullshit one must deal with when porting ANY application to Win32 to Unix (or vice versa)?" I mean, come on, does your application run on some X emulation layer in windows? Noooo, it doesn't (wild guess, there), so it doesn't use any sort of X API, so having one for linux would have saved you exactly dick.

    And of course whatever we decide on as a standard will have to be GPL'd..

    From the canvas download page:

    4.You may not modify, rent, resell for profit, distribute or create derivative works based on the Software or any part thereof.

    So you can include it as part of your $375.00 [deneba.com] gimp clone? No thankee.

    Also, on mention of netscape, does anyone know how the original netscape did it? Did they write their own toolkit for each OS?

    --
    blue

  • For the ambitious... (Score:3)

    by warrior ( 15708 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @06:11PM (#1096018) Homepage
    If you have problem with your GUI toolkit, simply make your own. Here was my situation: I was working on a graphics app. I was using motif. I updated to newer compilers, etc. My motif library didn't work anymore. So I looked at other toolkits. I didn't like them. I read more about X than the knowledge I needed to blit graphics to the screen. In four weeks, I had push buttons, toggle buttons, scale sliding thingies, scrollbars, and text widgets. And it can be themed with nice png images. It's easily extendable, whatever I can dream up. What I can't believe is that it took so many years for someone to get sick of Motif and write their own toolkit (Gtk). Now I know I'll hear people say "you're reinventing the wheel, why not use something that's out there gtk! qt!" Well, I don't like them so kiss off. I like my own little tk, 2208 lines of code, 56k, and it does everything motif did in 75% less lines of gui code. So, if you're bitching, do it yourself!

    Mike

  • Take a look at job listing then... (Score:3)

    by ^BR ( 37824 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @02:21AM (#1096019)

    Now try to fing a job e.g. in the finance area with your wonderful Qt of GTK+ experience.

    Motif is certainly a PITA to program but certainly is certainly the more powerful toolkit of the three. One thing that I can't stand with GTK+ is that preferences are host centric and not display centric... That's plain stupid, I can access the same app from many displays and certainly want preferences specific to the display, what if one is small and B&W and the other large and TrueColor, I certainly don't want the same font size and icons on both...

    GTK+ completely lost the network part of X... If I want a non network centric window system I can simply use Windows...

  • If you substitute "MFC" for "Motif"... (Score:3)

    by dlc ( 41988 ) <dlc.sevenroot@org> on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @01:45AM (#1096020) Homepage
    bash $ lynx -dump http://unix.oreilly.com/news/motif_0400.html | sed -e 's/motif/MFC/ig'

    Hmmm....

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • This is a huge problem for linux. We need a standard API for companies to seriously be able to develop software in linux. To preserve our freedoms by convincing corporations to free their software, we need to have a unified, standard, rock solid API for developing large scale applications. I do value the programmer's freedom in choosing from a selection of APIs but there is no reason we can't have a standard API and still have other choices.

    When I was finally able to convince my management to port to linux, the first thing we had to do was select a way to implement Canvas, so of course they asked me about the API. The response - that there is no really standard XFree86 api that is supported by the linx community - was just one more obstacle standing in the way of their acceptance. While we were still in this phase of planning, one of the managers suggested porting with WINE. WINE has been extremely helpful to us and has allowed us to port a major graphics application to linux from windows/mac in just 6 months. But, if we could've gone straight into the API and began hacking away, I'm sure those months could've been spent porting to a native app.

    And of course whatever we decide on as a standard will have to be GPL'd...

    ___________________________
    Michael Cardenas
    http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
    http://www.deneba.com/linux

  • Re:Dead? It's not, but it should be. (Score:3)

    by net-fu ( 85849 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @04:21PM (#1096022)
    I see commercial applications that are written in Motif all the time. There is nothing more painful than watching someone untrained in the zen of the Motif file selection box.

    Motif strikes me as an academic project-- it's too hierarchical. Top level programming is good, but not when its taken to the extreme. You end up with components that don't have a clue as to the function of the whole. It's the result of trying to be too many things to too many people, not beating a solid path to the goal, trying to be expandable in nonsensical ways, and desperately trying to avoid the eventual re-write.

    I'm sorry, but in my honest opinion, Motif is ugly, slow, and a bear to program. I think that it single handedly scared people away from writing X programs for a long time.

    The world is a much better place for having GTK and Qt, which were not designed with such lofty goals, but are much better products. What's more, they are still improving. I have a real issue with the 'innovation' that's taken place with Motif, when every time I see a program written with it, I feel like I've been magically transported back to 1991.

    Furthermore, any modern installation of HP/UX or Solaris that doesn't contain any GNU tools is being maintained by people whose lives are more difficult than they realize. Once you've got GNU gcc, make, bison, gzip (!), etc. no compilation (thanks to autoconf) is too difficult. Those programs are available as packages as well. GTK compiles well on Solaris (.. Qt was a pain the last time I tried, but that was over a year ago.)

    Really. Motif should die. CDE should die. Desktop environments aren't really necessary for most of these Motif applications. Just statically link them with Qt or GTK if you're that worried about what you're customers do and don't have.

    While we're on the subject, who are these open group people anyway? Their software development strategy is crap. X is the worst compile ever, follows none of the standard rules ("make World"?!?!). Why do they even bother using make when they recompile every .c file anyway?

    Just keep in mind-- these are the same people who invented the Imakefile!!

    gimp - the program that started it all

  • He doesn't get it... (Score:4)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @04:18PM (#1096023) Homepage

    He's latched on to some features that Motif has that haven't been fully realized in Qt or GTK+ and makes it seem as if these are the only ones that matter.

    Motif, being older, has all the little things worked out. It's a mature toolkit. GTK+ and Qt are newer and are naturally missing lots of little features.

    Motif will fall behind for two reasons:

    1) The developers of Qt and GTK+ have the benefit of hindsight. They've used Motif, Win32, and Mac and are able to learn from the mistakes of the past. While the toolkits themselves aren't entirely mature, the foundations are very strong and well designed. These guys know what they're doing.

    2) The proprietary attitude of the Motif developers. GUI development is driven by desktop applications and Linux is the hottest market for Unix desktops. Since Motif's licensing makes it difficult to support well under Linux, but GTK+ and Qt both work well under commercial Unix, Motif will die out. It makes no sense to use Motif when GTK+ apps will work better on Linux and be fully portable.

    Interestingly, many of the shortcomings that were pointed out in GTK+ (I don't really follow Qt) are currently under active development. Pango, for example, addresses the internationalization issues and is real software. It's not finished, but it's far from being vapour.

  • Motif's failure (Score:4)

    by jetson123 ( 13128 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @05:12PM (#1096024)
    I used to use Motif. It had an enormous number of bugs, which took vendors forever to fix. Even many years into its supposedly "stable" releases, it required turning off Purify error reporting because it simply had too many runtime errors and leaks. Motif was also complex, but the complexity wasn't justified by the limited functionality it had out of the box.

    The one advantage Motif could have had, a thriving component market didn't really work out. For any big project, licensing commercial software components for redistribution is a major hassle and expense. And any additional third party component that gets incorporated into a C/C++ program is a major risk because in C/C++ errors in any such component can show up in completely unrelated program parts. Generally, it's easier just to dedicate a programmer to building something equivalent in-house.

    To me, Motif represents everything that can go wrong with commercial software. Today, there are lots of excellent, high quality toolkits out there, many of them free. I can't imagine circumstances under which I would choose Motif ever again for either an open source or a new commercial project. In fact, I can't imagine choosing any toolkit that isn't covered under LGPL, BSD, or some other, similar license.

  • Crazy. (Score:4)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @03:20PM (#1096025)
    This guy's slightly off his rocker. Motif in no way compares to Qt and GTK. First of all, it's ugly as shit. That might not be technically important, but it can make or break software designed for mass consumption. Second, it is not nearly as feature filled as Qt and GTK. In addition to the base toolkit, KDE and GNOME have extended Qt and GTK to provide a great deal of application infrastructure. These are closely tied to the toolkit and for most intents and purposes, can be considered a part of them. Does Motif have COM? I didn't think so. Third, I find his attitude towards software appaling. I'm not a big fan of the Free Software community (I have nothing against it, but some of the people behind it like Stalin, err I mean Stallman piss me off) but I feel compelled to defend it. Free software can work great in the right environment, and is not against the grain of commercial (in his opinion "high quality") software. Lastly, what is this anonimity bullshit. I want to know who wrote this piece of junk so I can flame him! (Just kidding!) However, he explicitly says that they do not put their reputations and selves into the software. That is condusive to bad software. If you're going to write a program for a year, you damn better put yourself in there. By not staking their reputations, they wash their hands of the entire matter and show themselves as not caring about the quality of the software. Utter craziness.

  • GUI Builders?? Please? (Score:5)

    by X ( 1235 ) <x@xman.org> on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @10:11PM (#1096026) Homepage Journal
    I find it amusing that Motif is equated as a good GUI toolkit because it allows one to build great GUI builders.

    I guess that makes Visual programming languages better than anything else as well?

    Seriously, the job of a GUI library is NOT to make life easy for GUI builders. Just like every other library on the planet is not judged by how well a RAD tool can be intergrated with it. I particularly liked his comments about Java. I can tell you that Sun's own experts on Java's AWT and Swing will tell you that the first thing you should do if you want to have decent GUI code is NOT to use a GUI builder.

    The truth is, a modern GUI is much more sophisticated than what existed when Motif was originally put together. Motif was a great "internationalization capable" Forms package, but now we have this thing called HTML which does that job for us quite nicely. If you are going to use a GUI today you have to be far more sophisticated and flexible than that, and that requires having a good GUI programming library.

    I also was amused by his comments about how you could make C++ wrappers for Motif and suddenly Qt has no benefit: he couldn't be more wrong!! As Qt developers have said time and time again, there is a HUGE difference between a GUI library build from the ground up using C++ objects verses a functional library with C++ wrappers tacked on (this is usually said in reference to GTK+, but that's another story). Anyone who's looked at how Motif's "inheritence" works can appreciate this. Anyone who's used Qt before can also appreciate this.

    His comments about "support" for Motif vs. Open Source stuff shows complete ignorance of the support benefit derived from being open source. I can tell you from personal experience that I've been screwed over by bugs in various Motif libraries and I have NOT been able to get them fixed, partially because of the dwindling commercial support for them.

    His comments about not being able to have a cross platform GUI were also silly, particularly given how much he likes Java! While Java is indeed very cool, there are tons of circumstances under which it does not make sense (silly example: do you really want that clock in your Gnome Panel to require a huge Java VM to work?), which at the same time have nothing to do with being cross platform or not. If a cross-platform GUI library is really that useless then TrollTech must have excellent sales people given that they can sell Qt for Windows for thousands of dollars, despite the fact that everyone knows it's such an excellent Xwindows library. The funny thing is, the whole notion of how X was built came from the idea that you should be able to have ANY widget set applied to it. All you have to have to support Xwindows is conformance with the X protocol and it's various extensions.

    I've seen apps built with HTML, Tk, Qt, and wxWindows, and I tell you, they look pretty damn good to me on both platforms. I've also seen MFC apps that work pretty well on the MacOS (at least as well as they work on Windows... ;-).

    He commented about the 650 controls that are available for Motif, which sounds impressive. However, a lot of those are tons of proprietary (yes, that means they AREN'T interoperable) implementations of table views, because the existing table support is basically pathetic. Qt and GTK+ have the advantage of being open source which means that when you have N different implementations of a control, you tend to have the code migrate into just a few well supported controls rather than having tons of semi-functional commercial products. Then there's a bunch of graphing controls. Once you drop those, well, there just aren't that many interesting controls left.

    His comment about companies who won't touch GNU tools are COMPLETELY out of touch with reality (which may indeed describe some of these companies as well). While there might be a perception problem, there is not a real one, either technical or legal. First off, Qt isn't a GNU tool, so I guess that ends that part of the argument. Indeed, if you really feel compelled to pay money to feel good about a library, TrollTech charges extensive hunks of money to developers who want to pay for the tool kit (again, amazingly on multiple platforms!!). GTK+ is covered by the LGPL, which means there's no risk of losing proprietary technology unless you're extending the library.

    Finally, his comments about how everyone using Motif "in secret" are laughable. First off, there is nothing about open source that requires that you stand on the top of a hill and shout that you're using it. Indeed, so long as you aren't distributing your binaries, NOBODY need know what you're doing, because you're not necessarily even BUYING it from someone. Qt can be purchased under a license which does not require you to distribute your code. The cry of "lots of people are using this technology in secret" has been around for quite some time, and it's always that of an underrated technology (indeed, it's normally associated with startups). There was a time when people proudly shouted that they were using Motif. There was a time when people proudly shouted that they were using C compiler X or GUI toolkit Y. This is the kind of thing that commercial companies do in order to promote the idea that everyone is using your product. While there are companies who want to use technology in secret, if you really are popular, successful and growing there will be plenty of companies who will be happy to have you mention their names in a press release.

    I hate to say it, but this guys seems to be suffering from a bad case of NIH syndrome.
  • From Fountain's point of view, Motif is probably alive and well. The problem is that his world is one of proprietary software, proprietary Unix, and proprietary vendors, all of which have mean absolutely nothing to the new generation of users who have been raised on Linux/BSD and free software.

    One needs only examine some of his comments to see how badly out of touch Fountain is with the open source world:

    Motif has become the prima facie native toolkit on Unix. Every single major operating-system vendor supports and supplies it.
    Most Linux distributions don't supply Motif. The free *BSDs don't supply it. I'm certainly not about to pay for it, and even if I did, it's not really the same if you don't get source code.
    It does not matter how elegant a toolkit is in terms of programmer taste if at the end of the day the product derived from the toolkit is shorn of [list of cool features]
    It does not matter how cool a toolkit is if I can't obtain it. The closed nature of Motif means it is completely cut off from the free software community: even the small minority of people willing and able to pay for it aren't able to enjoy the freely licensed source code that they have come to value and expect.
    [Qt/GTK] fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed.
    He's got it exactly backwards from the way the free software community views things. Does he really think a closed, select group of NDA-d people can develop proprietary software faster than all the programmers in the world can develop open source software? As explained in The Cathedral and the Bazaar [tuxedo.org], software improves faster when development is open to all.

    I actually agree with Fountain that Motif isn't dead, but his reasons are all bass-ackwards. Motif owes its future life to corporate inertia, and not to any intrinsic advantages. In the free software world Motif suffers from the most crippling drawback of all: I can't get it, and I can't hack it.

  • Motif set about to capture the 'visual elegance' of Windows (pre-95), and has been stuck there ever since. The stupid drop-down fly-out menus (as opposed to drop down - scroll) Motif has are grounds enough for shooting someone. Motif does not "provide a GUI for Unix applications" -- it makes UNIX look retarded! It says, "Warning! This system is unusable! Try your toaster instead!"

    http://yawara.anime.net/gaijinFAQ/n etscape.html [anime.net]
    It being the case that Motif sucks beyond belief, and that Netscape Navigator uses Motif, you basically have to maim it to let it display Japanese in things like the Menu-bar, Bookmarks, and Forms.

    http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/ simcity/keynote.html [catalog.com]
    It wouldn't have been possible to port SimCity to X11 using Open Software Foundation's Motif toolkit. It just absolutely sucks. It's not open, and you have to pay for the source code, and it's not being maintained.

    http://www.mandrakeuser.org/connec t/cbrowse.html [mandrakeuser.org]
    The interface sucks. It is built with the legacy Motif library.

    http://shadowrun.html.com/ubb /Forum2/HTML/000007.html [html.com]
    And I programmed in C/X-windows/Motif for ten years. The most far away I can stand from that monster, the happier I am :)

    http://www.motifzone.com/resources/sta rt.htm [motifzone.com]
    Let's face it, X/Motif are sophisticated pieces of system software with lots of flexibility and power.

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /03/01/0644222.shtml [slashdot.org]
    I'm a professional X11 programmer, and GTK+ is one of the nicest widget sets about. Combined with GNOME it has the potential to beat even the object frameworks produced by Less Palatable Companies. For people who have never done professional X11 programming, Motif is CRAP. Everybody hates it. It was designed by a committee, and damn it shows. There's a reason it's called Bloatif. Even the addon packages to make Motif more usable (by giving it workable file dialogs, tree views, and a drag and drop you don't have to implement 90% by hand) are buggy, slow and memory hungry.

    http://slashdot.org/books/99/03/22 /0826250.shtml [slashdot.org]
    If it weren't for GTK I'd probably be programming Motif (well, OK, actually I'd be programming in QT, but that's besides the point). Motif is much like raw X Window System calls, except that Motif is MUCH MUCH WORSE! Motif is much like the stinky dead fish that your dog insists on digging up every time you try to throw it away. The world needs more Motif applications like I need a hole in my head. I can go on and on about this. Really, I can. Moral of the story: Learn a toolkit. Believe me on this one. I've made dumber comments, but few have been more true. Just don't do Motif. :^)
    [...]
    BTW, I agree about Motif. I think it was the worst thing to happen to Unix, ever. I think it did more to harm Unix as a platform than anything else that ever occurred during the 30+ years that Unix has been in existence.
    [...]
    Motif/Lesstif is arguably worse than gtk, and I programmed a lot of Motif.

    If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. - Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation

    http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/un ix/uh/x-windows.html [swin.edu.au]
    The Motif Self-Abuse Kit
    X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn't give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn't speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn't written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a "solution:" the Open Software Foundation's Motif. What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP's circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it "Motif." Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can't compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform.

  • Red Hat and Lesstif (Score:5)

    by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero@reCOMMAdhat.com minus punct> on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @01:26AM (#1096029) Homepage
    the only reason you don't see [Lesstif] more is because RH don't like LessTif since it pretty much killed one of their early profit-making schemes, which was selling a commercial Linux Motif implementation

    Please don't make such claims without verifying them. What you're saying is not quite true.
    We are actually shipping Lesstif in the Red Hat Linux Powertools (which is included in the Deluxe and Professional versions of Red Hat Linux and can be downloaded from your favorite mirror of redhat.com).

    We aren't putting it on the main CD simply because there are not many applications that use it anymore (name 3 interesting open-source projects using Motif/LessTif for anything), and because there are (almost?) no reasons to start a new project that makes use of it when toolkits like Qt and Gtk+ are available. Another big problem with Lesstif is the closed nature of Motif - despite the fact that the LessTif developers are obviously good people, they have to stick with the outdated Motif stuff and can't change stuff where it makes sense, the way Qt and Gtk people can. Lesstif is one of the many packages we'd probably include if we had infinite space on the CDs - but given the fact that CDs don't come with infinite space, we have to limit the choice of packages to those that make most sense to us.

    We don't dislike Lesstif - if it had been started or anywhere usable a couple of years ago, Red Hat would never have shipped a commercial Motif version. Open source tools are ALWAYS preferable over non-free ones.

    I also hate the Qt signal/slot kludge

    Why, and how do you think it should be implemented?

  • Motif C++ OpenGL (Score:5)

    by small_dick ( 127697 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2000 @03:58PM (#1096030)
    ...i program all three, together, almost every day.

    i admit it's butt ugly if the programmer is clueless. but a programmer who has used it for awhile can get by most of the visual issues by setting resources properly, etc.

    Netscape isn't a terrible looking application, after all -- Motif.

    Sun's awt doesn't look too bad -- Motif.

    it's amazing how much hate can be directed toward a product by the ignorant.

    that said, all you have to do is read Doug Young's book on C++/Motif or Kilgard's book on OpenGL and X, and you quickly learn that mistakes were made in the visual inheritance hierarchies. but they are well-known, and the tricks are documented.

    pls. remember that motif was out before most teenagers were born, before win95...i think it predates win3.1

    i've built up a small set of software components that simply replace a form -- it's as easy as subbing the form, and realizing the component. we have a lot of standard things we do here, and i can crank out a new app in days that runs much faster than anything scripted or interpreted.

    give motif a break. it has lived a long life and had a successful career, and donated a lot of good infrastructure into all the toolkits that came after.

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