Licensing concerns with Open Motif

[John Cowan]

Please forward this to the correct team within the Open Group.

The license-discuss at opensource.org mailing list has been discussing
Open Motif. Several participants are concerned that the term "operating
system" is not defined in the Open Motif license.

If interpreted to mean "distribution", several Linux distributions, such
as Red Hat, include software such as Sun StarOffice that is not Open Source.
(Indeed, the well-known "zip" and "unzip" utilities, very widely used in
the Unix/Linux/BSD world, are not technically Open Source either.)
It would be unfortunate to say the least if Open Motif could not be distributed
with Red Hat Linux.

We therefore suggest that you define "operating system" to refer only to
the *kernel* of the operating system, without regard to any bundled
utilities or application software.  That would include all known Linux
and BSD distributions.

Thank you.

-- 

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