Leading items and editorials:
“Motif is open source – almost. The Open Group has announced
that the Motif toolkit, long the standard X toolkit on commercial
Unix systems, has been released under a “public license.” This
license looks roughly GPLish in that it requires that source be
made available and disallows restrictions on redistribution. It has
an interesting twist, however, in that it only allows for use of
the software on “operating systems which are themselves Open Source
programs….”
“Microsoft versus Slashdot. Most readers will have long since
seen Microsoft’s notice to Slashdot requiring the removal of some
comments posted to the site that are alleged to violate Microsoft’s
copyrights. In the simple facts of the matter, Microsoft might even
have a point. If we respect copyright law (which, after all,
provides the force behind the GPL), we should respect it for
everybody. Directly posting Microsoft’s copyrighted material was
probably not the best move….”
“SGI pushes toward Linux. SGI has announced a new line of
workstations which will, it hopes, begin to turn around the
company’s poor performance in recent years. The systems look more
reasonable than SGI’s last attempt: the pricing is reasonable, the
graphics are good, and so on. These might actually be computers
that somebody wants to buy….”