ICS Announces Developer's Release of Themes for Open Motif

Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS) announced the Developer's Release of its initiative to add themes to Open Motif. Themes is a capability supplied with Linux desktop environments that provides users with the ability to personalize the overall look of the user interface of their desktop. The integration of themes into Open Motif will improve the usability of enterprise applications ported to Linux while allowing them to continue to be developed with the highly reliable Motif user interface toolkit. The Developer Release of Themes for Open Motif works with GTK themes created for Gnome, the default desktop on Red Hat Linux. Currently, themes are converted by hand into a format that Open Motif can process.

As the Open Motif Themes capability evolves, no conversion will be necessary and Open Motif based applications will automatically adopt the theme set by the end user. The objective of the initiative is to support both the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. ICS is actively looking to recruit other Open Source developers to help with this project. In addition, with the adoption of Gnome on non-Linux platforms, ICS is in discussions to provide themes capability for Motif on traditional UNIX platforms too. This will provide existing applications using Motif with further personalization facilities that will smooth portability between Linux and UNIX even further. The Developer Release of Themes for Open Motif is available for free download at the Open Motif community site, http://www.motifzone.net. Changes made to the internals of Open Motif will be released under the Open Group Public license. Software written exclusively by ICS, and external to the Open Motif toolkit will be released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) originally developed by Netscape and an officially recognized open source license. This will allow the ICS software to be reused by other Open Source efforts.