On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 12:56:07PM -0600, Kathryn Hogg wrote: > > Isn't OpenMotif free to use in commercial software? > http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/ > That is not clear, in my opinion (and I am not a lawyer, but I can read). Section 4 addresses commercial distribution, but talks solely about protecting the original copyright holders from mis-use or damage that is a result of using the "Program" ("Program" is defined as the Motif libraries). It states in Sec. 4 that the license is "intended to facilitate the commercial use" but this is subject to to the limitations provided in Section 2. In Sec. 2 it states that this license grants rights that are "limited solely" to distribution (and sublicensing) of the "Contributions" for operating systems which are themselves Open Source programs. ("Contributions" are defined as multiple things but is basically equivalent to "Program" in this case.) Sec. 2 continues with stating that the Open Group shall be contacted for license allowing distribution and sublicensing of the "Original Program" for operating systems which are not Open Source programs. (I think that is ambiguous...) Sec. 2 proceeds with some guarantees for anyone building software on it (that would be a person using this software for commercial use). It states that such software works can be distributed as source or object code _and_ royalty-free, which is your point exactly. After all of this, I still see that the license _facilitates_ commercial use but does not immediately grant it. The internetz claim it is free to link against, which is why people like me were developing for it but were using Lesstif (almost 100% compatible). Binaries can be linked against Motif, even if they are not themselves open-source. The long version can be found if you follow the links starting from Wikipedia. WP states that in 2012, after many years of being proprietary, it has been released under the GNU Lesser GPL, or LGPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_%28software%29 Here comes the problem. A distributor of non-open software (binaries) would likely have to maintain a LOT of versions of the software and handle any incompatibilities at run-time given that their user can have any version of the Motif libraries installed (and that on top of a glibc that is different, GCC-lib interinsics that are different, etc). The solution is to get a license from the Open Group and narrow down the incompatibilities to much fewer. For mass-distribution binaries the process continues to suck. For a small company who talks to their clients to make software sales, all this can be bypassed as they can build specific versions for the client site's machines, etc. I worked for a company like that once. Software licensing is tricky.