The Open Software Foundation (OSF), an industry consortium of Unix workstation vendors, developed Motif in 1989. Their aim was to ensure a consistent user experience -- in so doing, they focused on a style guide, a definition for a window manager, and a "look and feel" (L&F) in the personal-computing sense. Motif's visual style and semantics conform to IBM's Common User Access (CUA) definition, as did contemporary Windows. Motif's competitors in its infancy included Athena and OpenLook.

Motif was so successful that engineering and data-processing departments came to expect its high-quality look and feel. Most hardware vendors licensed the Motif library from OSF and its descendants and bundled it with their distribution operating systems. Thus, when you buy a modern Solaris, you receive a run-time library required to develop GUI applications.

Agreement on Motif frayed in the middle of the 1990s, as Unix vendors diverged slightly in their definition of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). But perhaps the single most important event since Motif's original adoption by leading vendors occurred just a few months ago. On May 15, The Open Group (TOG), OSF's successor, released Motif's source code for use under open source operating systems (OSs).

Does licensing matter?

The significance of this licensing change is yet to be determined. One impetus for the shift seems to be ISVs' interest in coordinating their inventory of Unix applications to fit the emerging Linux Standard Base (LSB) initiative. This is similar to Motif in that many of its technical aspects make sense only in the context of once-standard software that is now aging.

Insiders hint that TOG might modify the license again to make it fully compliant with the open source definition. Vendors such as Metro Link have long provided high-quality Motif versions for Linux and other open source Unixes. Moreover, the Hungry Programmers have been working for several years on LessTif, a reimplementation of Motif available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The announcement's most significant initial consequence might be the reminding of several hundred thousand Linux and BSD developers that there's an alternative to the GTK, Qt, Tk, and other toolkits that currently receive the majority of attention. As we'll see, there's plenty they'll want to know.

Why use Motif?

Motif is more than just another toolkit. It's the basis for thousands of successful applications, principally because Motif:

• Is an accepted standard
• Works on a wide variety of equipment
• Provides User Interface Language (UIL)
• Is an area of expertise for many
• Has an unrivaled commercial infrastructure

The Motif L&F is standard in many organizations, and associated with professionalism in others. While the consumer market expects shrink-wrapped applications to have a conventional Windows appearance, engineering users largely equate quality with Motif visuals. It's common for companies with large workstation fleets to require their purchases to conform to Motif in order to minimize training of their users. On the production side, ISVs often standardize on Motif as the market leader among GUI toolkits.

Motif's visual design is also admired. While it is difficult

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