Question for net.views column in UNIX Today!

[DE Robertson james an 740-9172]

In article <9104020203.AA00284 at bud.cs.ubc.ca.ubc.ca> bud.cs.ubc.ca!lowe at uunet.UU.NET (David Lowe) writes:
>
>Re: Is a single GUI standard really necessary?
>
>
>I can hardly believe that Sun, which did so much to start the open
>systems movement, is now doing everything it can to force its own
>interface onto its customers.  Sun is still the hardware of choice
>for universities, but whenever I visit other universities I hear
>nothing but anger at Sun's refusal to adopt the same interface that
>was selected by other major manufacturers.  It is behaving in the
>way that IBM used to, and this will cost it dearly in the long run.
>At the moment, it is being just successful enough to thoroughly
>confuse its own users and make them avoid adopting any GUI.
>
	Well, I don't really fault Sun for this. SF is charging $1000.00
for the Motif toolkit - and that's PER toolkit. They also charge a $50.00
royalty for each application shipped that was built using Motif.  
	Contrast this with Sun - OpenWindows (including OLIT and XView
toolkits) ships with the OS. There is no additional fee for those toolkits 
and no royalties for development done with them. I would find fault with OSF
long before I found fault with Sun on this issue.

>  David Lowe
>  Assistant Professor, Computer Science
>  (604) 228-3170

James A. Robertson

--
Jim Robertson,   INET: jarober at warper.jhuapl.edu, jarober at aplcen.apl.jhu.edu
Johns Hopkins Univ./APL   UUCP: {backbone!}mimsy!aplcen!jarober