Open Source CDE petition.

[Peter Howkins]

Are you interested in the idea of CDE becomming
Open Source?

If so consider signing the petition on this site,
which I'll send on to The Open Group.

http://www.petitiononline.com/opencde/petition.html

With additional background information here.

http://www.marutan.net/cde/

If you've any questions feel free to ask
or email me for more information.

Peter Howkins

[Sami M. J. Nieminen]

"Peter Howkins" <mar...@gmail.com> writes:

> Are you interested in the idea of CDE becomming
> Open Source?
>
> If so consider signing the petition on this site,
> which I'll send on to The Open Group.
>
> http://www.petitiononline.com/opencde/petition.html

The petition says:

"As a user - or former or potential user - of the Common Desktop
Environment (CDE) I believe there would be a benefit to releasing
the source code to CDE and the Motif library under an OSI approved
licence. I humbly request that you, The Open Group, investigate
this possibility and use your best efforts to accomplish this
goal."

Now, being more of the Free Software camp and a Debian user, I would
like if the petition would also request CDE to be released under such
a license, that both the Free Software Foundation and Debian would
accept it as Free Software. All that, however, might be a little
difficult to fit into a text and still keep it readable. But could it
at least mention Free Software?

It might also be worthwhile mentioning in the petition itself some of
the benefits of liberating CDE that are mentioned in the background
info in http://www.marutan.net/cde/.

All that having been said, I would love to see CDE released as Free
Software / Open Source. But I wouldn't get my hopes up. See, in the
"Open Motif FAQ", (http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/faq.html)
published in 2000, they say:

"QUESTION:

Will Motif be made Open Source in the future?

ANSWER:

Yes, we hope to be able to make a distribution under a license
complying with the Open Source guidelines sometime in the
future. For now this is as close as to Open Source as we could
get."

Its been six years and as far as I know the Open Motif license still
says:

"The rights granted under this license are limited solely to
distribution and sublicensing of the Contribution(s) on, with, or
for operating systems which are themselves Open Source programs."

This means that Open Motif is neither Open Source or Free
Software. Therefore I fear that The Open Group may not be very
receptive for a petition like this. Of course, that doesn't mean we
shouldn't try.

--
Sami M. J. Nieminen
sami.mj....@kapsi.fi