Re: [gtk-list] Re: To GTK, or not to GTK - that is the question

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Ulric Eriksson wrote:
> 
> The lack of a decent Motif replacement for Linux makes porting to Linux
> harder than porting to other Unixes, because like it or not, Motif is the
> standard.

You can still get Motif for Linux just as you can on other Unixes, it just
costs money. And you can get Lesstif. It's not like Gtk makes them go
away.

> And basing Gtk on a proprietary framework makes porting any Xt
> based application harder than necessary, because like it or not, Xt is the
> standard.
> 

Gtk's framework isn't proprietary; anyone can use it and modify it and
whatever. It is new and different though. I haven't written in Motif, but
I imagine its object system is both harder to use and less well adapted to
language bindings and GUI builders, two big advantages of the Gtk system.

However the fact is, from a free-software perspective, there are very few
significant applications which require Motif. I can think of XEmacs (where
it's optional), and DDD. Recently Mozilla was added; but they've decided
to drop it. Maybe a couple things of less general interest, and small
easily-duplicated or easily-ported applications. The most common kit has
been Tk, or Xaw, and even in those there are few applications worth
mentioning.  The fact is, GUI free software was not very common or good
until KDE and the Gimp/Gtk, followed by Gnome. 

If you consider GNU/Linux as a system, there is simply very little legacy
code to port. So this is not a concern to many of us. Proprietary apps may
not like porting to Gtk; but they don't have to. They can buy a Motif
license and ship statically linked. 

But the real reason is probably this: successful free software must be
interesting and fun to code, unless it is devastatingly useful. Motif is
not devastatingly useful to most free software developers. So interesting
and fun is the primary motive in a GUI kit. This means it has to be
possible to add new features (themes, language bindings), the API must be
nice, etc. Adhering to the Motif standard is just not interesting for most
developers; the benefits are not visible from a free software point of
view.

Havoc