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mhd | 1 month ago

That's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.

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flomo|1 month ago

The version number was just a joke. But if the "standard unix gui toolkit" was under an open source license back in the 1990s, I am sure people would have run with that rather than inventing something else.

hapless|1 month ago

motif had the opposite of versionitis

from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful

it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`

mhd|1 month ago

> motif had the opposite of versionitis

I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)