[TUHS] ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Alan Coopersmith via TUHS]

On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten (I hope) 
> GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember DEC, HP, and IBM, 
> among others) supporting an X Window System GUI toolkit called Motif battled Sun 
> and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant, but 
> Motif won the day. It came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which was 
> easily the most arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they were 
> disbanded as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or monopolistic 
> behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines.

OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group, though the lawsuit you mention
is described in the History section of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation .

> I think the 
> Motif folks managed at one point to get their own standards committee. I know 
> that our effort fizzled. I don't know if there ever was a Motif standard.

After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window System,
as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.  Later versions
of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components altogether.

> Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad student. 
> OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation programmers, but I don't know 
> if it ever appeared on any other system.

At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as open source,
and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some other applications are
still available from either https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris