[214] in SIPB_Linux_Development
anyone want to do Mosaic for linux?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (brlewis@MIT.EDU)
Mon Nov 22 15:47:25 1993
From: brlewis@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 15:46:58 -0500
To: www@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu's message of 22 Nov 93 05:10:31
This substantive post appeared in the middle of a flame session on
several newsgroups. I include the entire post here for the curious, but
the part pertinent to www and linux-dev is near the end, marked by >'s.
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.os.linux.development,comp.sources.d
Date: 22 Nov 93 05:10:31
Organization: Nat'l Center for Supercomputing Applications
Distribution: inet
NNTP-Posting-Host: wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu
In article <ellis.753644883@nova> ellis@nova.gmi.edu (R. Stewart
Ellis) writes:
[...] the rather unfortunate decision of the Mosaic team to develop
with Motif. When I raised an alarm on the use of Motif several
months ago, Marc Andreessen justified the choice on ease of using
the widgets, but excused the choice by pointing out that Mosaic
would be available statically linked for most significant platforms
at NCSA. The Linux crowd have been posting statically linked
versions of Mosaic on sunsite and other sites for some time now,
even with builtin term support I believe. Mosaic is perhaps the
single most important free Internet application and the modal way
of acquiring it is to ftp it from one of these sites, already
statically linked. If the statements about license fees for every
distributed copy are true, then those of us who have been getting
Mosaic this way will be cut off.
Responding to both this post and others...
(a) Our academic site license lets us distribute free,
statically-linked binaries of Mosaic compiled with Motif 1.2 all
we want. We can distribute dynamically-linked binaries of Mosaic
compiled with Motif 1.2 as well, as long as we don't distribute
the Motif libraries themselves along with the dynamically-linked
binaries (which we would't). Please don't argue with me on these
points unless you're an OSF lawyer, as they are -- so far as I
know, and based on conversations with OSF folks -- facts. And
remember, Motif 1.1 was even less restrictive, and is still widely
used (our own Sun binaries, for example, are linked to 1.1).
(b) EVERY significant workstation vendor has committed to Motif, and
everyone but Sun has been shipping it for quite some time. (Sun
is apparently finally getting around to shipping it as beta
software to some Solaris customers, and will have it out in force
early next year -- it is damned annoying that they've stalled on
this as long as they have. But that's Sun.)
Motif is the closest thing there is to a de facto interface
standard on Unix workstations. (Athena does *not* count, and
neither does tcl/tk -- flames will be ineffectual as we take
Mosaic too seriously to base it on anything not directly supported
by the majority of hw/sw vendors out there. And besides, there's
already a fine tcl/tk browser.)
No, Motif isn't free, and it doesn't come with Linux and similar
systems. All I can say is that for Mosaic for X's target user
base, the vendors have it covered, and for the user base of which
Linux is a part (Intel 386/486/Pentium), we're developing Mosaic
for Windows. Not a perfect solution, but it does give us broader
coverage than any of the imaginable alternatives with the
foundation of vendor-supported technology on each platform. Also,
don't get me wrong -- I love the idea of running Mosaic for X
under Linux, and will probably be doing that myself in the not too
> distant future; remember, all it really takes is someone with an
> academic site license for Motif and a Linux box to make a binary
> everyone can use, or donate us a development system and we'll do
> it.
Cheers,
Marc
--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (MIME welcomed here)
