Leading items and editorials RMS on OpenMotif . Richard Stallman has, in classic form, posted this polemic against the use of Open Motif . His complaint, of course, is that Open Motif's license is not an open source license. The point he makes is valid, and has been made by a number of other people as well. Meanwhile, Mr. Stallman's latest has drawn a round of criticism from those who see him as a perpetually unsatisfied whiner.
Freedom is important.
While many of us may be more pragmatic in how we go about our daily lives, we are all well served by having an uncompromising, pro-freedom voice out there. Microsoft patents a file format . It seems that Microsoft has a patent on that particular format, and wasn't pleased with the existence of a free implementation. This looks like yet another software patent issue. It is not at all hard to see what could happen with an extension of that claim.