CAMBRIDGE,Massachusettes (March 6, 1997) - The Open Group, the leading organization for the advancement of open systems, announced today the unifying release of its widely acclaimed Motif graphical user interface (GUI). This release solves user interface development incompatibilities across platforms, shortening application development time and reducing customer support costs.
"The latest release builds on the existing strengths of the Motif GUI to make Motif 2.1 more powerful, flexible and customer focused than ever before," said Dave Lounsbury, vice president of collaborative development. "By providing complete compatibility with The Open Group's Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and the newly- acquired X Window System technology. This release provides portable, reliable, standardized platforms across all three layers of the graphical user environment."
Designed to enhance valuable investment in software and customer training, the latest release of Motif provides new features including support for multi-threading, simplified printing in applications and state-of-the-art internationalization with vertical text writing, "on- the-spot" input and user-defined characters for Asian languages. Additional technical enhancements make Motif a robust and easy-to-use option for system programmers and software developers.
For customers, Motif 2.1 provides a way to leverage their investments in existing systems, applications and training. Specifically, it offers users the ability to select interfaces compatible with the ones they currently use and to specify one standard interface for the future. Additionally, Motif allows software vendors and other application developers to port applications across a variety of single and multi-user hardware platforms and build custom graphical objects ("widgets") quickly, easily and with reduced server overhead. Finally, for system vendors, Motif 2.1 provides GUI compatibility with more than 200 different platforms, allowing vendors to unify the appearance and behavior of applications on all the platforms they supply.
Motif 2.1 builds on the earlier versions of Motif to provide a number of key benefits and features, including:
Motif, the industry standard graphical user interface, as defined by the IEEE 1295 specification, is used on more than 200 hardware and software platforms. By providing application portability across a variety of platforms, the Motif environment helps protect valuable investments in software and user training. The standard GUI also provides applications with interoperability and scalability. Motif is the base graphical user interface toolkit for the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), which provides a single, standard graphical desktop and desktop tool set for all platforms that support the X Window System.
The price of a full-distribution source code license for Motif 2.1 is $17,000 . An upgrade from a full- distribution Motif 2.0 license is $2000; from a full- distribution Motif 1.2 license, $9000.
Industry project sponsors for release of Motif 2.1 include Digital Equipment Corporation, Fujitsu, Hewlett- Packard, Hitachi, IBM, SCO, Silicon Graphics and SunSoft.
Dedicated to the advancement of multi-vendor information systems, The Open Group is an international consortium of systems and software vendors and customers from the industry, government and academia. The Open Group and its members work together to strengthen and streamline the development process and availability of open systems. The organization provides a focal point for the development of international specifications and test suites, standards based technologies, advanced open systems research, professional services and the management of the internationally recognized brand for open systems. The Open Group's brand mark is recognized worldwide and is a guarantee of compliance to open systems specifications. The Open Group is Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with European headquarters in Reading, England and offices in Menlo Park, CA; Brussels, Belgium; Grenoble, France; and Tokyo, Japan.
Open Software Foundation, OSF, the OSF logo, OSF/1, OSF/Motif, Motif, X/Open, and UNIX are registered trademarks, and The Open Group, "X" device, X Consortium and X Window System are trademarks, of The Open Group. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT:
Jane Smeloff
The Open Group
(617) 621-8997
j.smeloff@opengroup.org
URL:http://www.opengroup.org