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One irony of the situation is that Debian itself has the same problem with their branding: if you modify the distribution, you can't call it Debian any more.

It should be noted that many Debian developers consider their trademark policy to be flawed, although nobody really knows how to fix it. Former DPL Branden Robinson discusses some of the issues in this article.

Sorry for any typos and missing link tags in the above. I'm in a bit of a rush as there's a flight I've got to catch in about 45 minutes, and I need to wander back over to the gate area. (Useful WiFi coverage in U.S. airports appears to be a task for future generations).

To answer the question in your subject, I'm right here. Where've you been? :)

This doesn't bode well for the future of Debian.

To be fair, the imminent death of Debian was predicted steadily for years before I became Project Leader, was again immediately upon my election, has been again today (by you), and, I'm confident, will continue to be well after I'm gone. I hope you'll forgive me if I therefore cannot find the substance in remarks like the above.

Leaving aside squalid arguments about whether a local user group is entitled to use the term "Debian" when organizing a whip round for a barbeque (yes, a real example from the Debian mailing lists),

Well, a whip round that involved constituting a formal organization under UK law, yeah. I presume you're referring to this thread, in which, rather than pontificating like a gasbag, I actually, er, granted the Debian UK Society a license to use Debian's name so they can continue to get themselves set up while their critics make whatever case they're going to make about the organization's shortcomings. The issue seems to largely to have burned itself out at this point, and I expect the Project will continue to tolerate this particular usage of its name as long as the Debian UK Society behaves itself.

the real question is how and whether Debian reacts to the commercial pressures now being placed on it from other software outfits (some of whose guiding lights are themselves long-time Debian players).

I agree. That's an important question. I wouldn't call it "the real question" because that just puts us in a reactive mode. Our trademark policy needs to be founded on some concrete notions of what we want to accomplish. The ad hoc policy of 6 years ago, as I discussed in the message you seem to be disparaging, is no longer sufficient to guide our actions. Years ago, VA Linux Systems and Progeny slapped the Debian name on retail boxed OS products (incidentally, both were derivations of Debian GNU/Linux, not official versions). Back then that didn't raise much of a fuss. Things of changed. I think we should develop a coherent concept of what "trademark" means to us. With that coherent concept, we can establish a policy that can be efficiently and fairly enforced. Without one, we risk being perceived as capricious. As a hypothetical, "it's okay for DCC Alliance to use the Debian marks, but SLX Debian Labs and Ubuntu are right out." Any given user with a bit of analytical reasoning ability should be able to look at a trademark policy page on the Debian website, and given sufficient knowledge of an organization's activities, deduce whether or not their usage of Debian's mark meets with out approval.

For example, the new DCC Alliance seems to have gone right ahead as it pleased, helping themselves to Debian's good name with a contemptous "and what are you gonna do about it?" Not much, it would appear (or, at least, not much that's been made public).

As mentioned at the very beginning of the message I wrote which you seem to be disparaging, I've delegated the specific task of handling DCC Alliance's usage of the Debian mark to another Debian developer, because I personally work for a DCC Alliance member corporation and want to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. I've been communicating with Don reguarly, and on 19 September he posted a status message to the debian-project mailing list. Don and I both wish things were moving more swiftly, but he seems to be stuck mainly on the mail-response latency of the corporate executive types he's dealing with. He doesn't feel he's been jerked around y

To answer the question in your subject, I'm right here. Where've you been? :)

This doesn't bode well for the future of Debian.

To be fair, the imminent death of Debian was predicted steadily for years before I became Project Leader, was again immediately upon my election, has been again today (by you), and, I'm confident, will continue to be well after I'm gone. I hope you'll forgive me if I therefore cannot find the substance in remarks like the above.

Leaving aside squalid arguments about whether a local user group is entitled to use the term "Debian" when organizing a whip round for a barbeque (yes, a real example from the Debian mailing lists),

Well, a whip round that involved constituting a formal organization under UK law, yeah. I presume you're referring to this thread, in which, rather than pontificating like a gasbag, I actually, er, granted the Debian UK Society a license to use Debian's name so they can continue to get themselves set up while their critics make whatever case they're going to make about the organization's shortcomings. The issue seems to largely to have burned itself out at this point, and I expect the Project will continue to tolerate this particular usage of its name as long as the Debian UK Society behaves itself.

the real question is how and whether Debian reacts to the commercial pressures now being placed on it from other software outfits (some of whose guiding lights are themselves long-time Debian players).

I agree. That's an important question. I wouldn't call it "the real question" because that just puts us in a reactive mode. Our trademark policy needs to be founded on some concrete notions of what we want to accomplish. The ad hoc policy of 6 years ago, as I discussed in the message you seem to be disparaging, is no longer sufficient to guide our actions. Years ago, VA Linux Systems and Progeny slapped the Debian name on retail boxed OS products (incidentally, both were derivations of Debian GNU/Linux, not official versions). Back then that didn't raise much of a fuss. Things of changed. I think we should develop a coherent concept of what "trademark" means to us. With that coherent concept, we can establish a policy that can be efficiently and fairly enforced. Without one, we risk being perceived as capricious. As a hypothetical, "it's okay for DCC Alliance to use the Debian marks, but SLX Debian Labs and Ubuntu are right out." Any given user with a bit of analytical reasoning ability should be able to look at a trademark policy page on the Debian website, and given sufficient knowledge of an organization's activities, deduce whether or not their usage of Debian's mark meets with out approval.

For example, the new DCC Alliance seems to have gone right ahead as it pleased, helping themselves to Debian's good name with a contemptous "and what are you gonna do about it?" Not much, it would appear (or, at least, not much that's been made public).

As mentioned at the very beginning of the message I wrote which you seem to be disparaging, I've delegated the specific task of handling DCC Alliance's usage of the Debian mark to another Debian developer, because I personally work for a DCC Alliance member corporation and want to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. I've been communicating with Don reguarly, and on 19 September he posted a status message to the debian-project mailing list. Don and I both wish things were moving more swiftly, but he seems to be stuck mainly on the mail-response latency of the corporate executive types he's dealing with. He doesn't feel he's been jerked around y

Here's Project Leader Branden's Robinson's full (much longer) comments on the trademark issue.

His main point seems to be that trademarks can lead to forking, whether it be forced by the trademark holder or voluntary, and that these trademark forks can lead to confusion (Why are these forked version unofficial? Is it really the same product? Which is the 'best' version?), inefficiency (harder to share code between forks) and fragmentation of the open-source community. Moreover, the implicit threat of trademarks - play by our rules or lose the name - seems at odds with the ethos of freedom to make changes that at the core of the free software movement.

He ends with three main questions that Debian will have to resolve:
* Why even have a trademark? What protections does it give that are useful for Debian? How do these protections different internationally, within dozens of different national jurisdictions?

* What is the approval process for using the Debian trademark? Should some groups get automatic approval, or should Debian leverage its trademark to compel vendors to contact Debian?

* Can we apply the Copyleft principle to trademark? That is, how can we turn trademark on its head and make it a tool to promote the open and free use of Debian and other projects instead of a device to restrict the rights of others?

The X strike force (the guys who do X for debian) made the decision to stick with xfree for sarge back when the license schism happened. Debian release planning is a long, well-planned process, and changing something as fundamental as the graphical subsystem wasn't something they were willing to do in the middle of a release cycle. The plan was to wait until after sarge to switch over.

X.org is going through major changes in the way it's packaged. Basically, it's one big chunk of program - just like xfree, more or less - and they're moving it over to a more modular system. Because of this, the debian maintainers had decided to wait until the modular tree was released before switching to X.org. It seems that this is taking longer than expected, so according to the FAQ on their site they will be moving over to it soon and modularizing along the way. That's a big relief to me, since I run unstable on my workstation and have been looking forward to X.org for quite some time.

So yeah, the next release should be X.org, but with the changes in supported architectures, hopefully it won't be three years before etch is released.

That's not true. The Debian X package maintainers ("strike force") are working on preparing a mostly-monolithic release of X.Org 6.8.2 right now. xprint is already separately maintained and will not be supplied from the X.Org monolithic tree, and xterm may be split off too. Josh Triplett is working on packaging the libraries, but Debian's not planning on waiting for that to happen before releasing X.Org, at least to experimental.

I think debian was the first distro to announce a switch to xorg, though I may be wrong.

Debian was certainly one of the first. Branden Robinson raised concerns about the freenees of the new XFree86 license almost immediately. No one in the Debian camp was happy with the new license, so the decision to switch to X.Org was pretty much made for Debian by XFree86 itself.

In order to get off the ground quickly, xorg has been releasing versions based on xmkmf that have only really been tested on x86 and ppc.

That's not a serious problem for Debian, which has been building xfree86 4.3.0 for all the architectures in sarge (arm, alpha, i386, ia64, powerpc, mips, mipsel, sparc, s390, m68k, hppa) plus amd64 and i386 versions of freebsd/netbsd and GNU Hurd for years. Most if not all of the patches made for portability's sake have been submitted various to the XFree86 Project and/or freedesktop.org over the years.

That's great, and means 90% of the people reading this can run xorg now instead of waiting six months for a non-legacy version.

A guy named Andres Salomon has extremely unofficial packages of X.Org for Debian unstable available now, or (with some difficulty) people can use Ubuntu's. The people who have an immediate need for something that works can get that need filled. Official packages which provide a little more polish and have had more eyes on them will take care of the rest of the people.

It's possible that the new "volatile" distribution of Debian, intended to bolt onto the now-released sarge and provide updates for non-release-critical problems (like new hardware databases, spam/virus filter rules, device drivers, etc.) might be able to house a stripped-down xserver-xorg-only package in the near future to service the video hardware out there that Debian's xfree86 4.3.0 (with several backported and updated drivers) won't.

Debian has been about doing things right, and waiting until they can do things right. They don't want to change to the transitional version of xorg and then change to the non-legacy version of xorg in six months.

Actually if you follow the debian-x mailing list, you'll see that Debian is prepared to cope with that.

When xorg gets around to a proper build script based around configure, and starts supporting all the architectures of xfree86, then debian will switch to them.

Debian isn't waiting on that to happen. The sooner it does, the better, but Debian doesn't want to tie its schedule to X.Org's. I agree that Debian's hell-bent on getting things right, though, even though some people characterise their efforts at regression testing as pointless.

David Nusinow and Branden Robinson (and it looks like Nathaniel Nerode is joining them) are doing most of the work to prepare X.Org 6.8.2 for Debian release. It draws in part from the Ubuntu packages, but not entirely. A Canonical employee named Daniel Stone, who contributed to Debian's XFree86 4.3.0 packages a couple of years ago but then started

They might complain about xfree 4.3

Um, nope. See this:

http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/svn/xfree86/trunk/de bian/local/FAQ.xhtml#debianplans

See the homepage of the The Debian X Strike Force - X.org and Xfree86 guys.

Found this link from the Project Leader's page

http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/svn/xfree86/trunk/de bian/local/FAQ.xhtml#debianplans

they are NOT going to move before sarge release the x.org issue simply happened too late in the sarge develeopment cycle (remember debian supports a lot more than just i386/powepc/ia64/x86-64) which they must ensure that all the crucial system stuff behaves on.

The original party line was that Debian's X team was waiting on a modularized X.Org source tree.

Debian's X team now is in a holding pattern until Sarge gets out, though I don't remember ever seeing this stated directly. For instance, in this message to dri-devel, Branden Robinson clarifies that Debian will package Xorg in the same fashion as XFree86 if the modular version isn't ready yet.

The Debian X Faq states, more or less, the same thing.

You don't see "No Xorg till Sarge releases" anywhere because none of the X team members are fortune tellers. I would imagine that NOW, with the freeze underway, they'd be happy to say it.

On that note, does anyone know when Debian will adopt X.org?

Short answer: It shouldn't take very long at all since it's already been packaged for Ubuntu. A new X.org release with a different packaging structure is scheduled to be released soon, so that will complicate things a bit. The new release is supposed to be included in the next Ubuntu release if it gets out early enough, so most of the packaging work will be done.
Long answer: Debian X Strike Force

I was just saying

You called my questions "stupid" and "trivial".

that the answer is available on google (albeit not in the first link, you have to dig a bit)

Once again, did you actually check your own answer to see if it worked well? A needle in a haystack is not a good answer.

I'm looking for a definitive answer from the Debian leadership-- all I could find ws some email posts from people who, until this morning, were complete strangers. Should I trust "Joe Schmoe" when he says x.org will be included after the Sarge release?

also in the Debian faq as someone pointed out.

Unfortunately, the answer is NOT in the Debian FAQ. It should be.

There is an answer in this other FAQ at 'deadbeast.net'. Until Brandan (and others) responded to my post, I had no idea what Deadbeast.net was, who Brandan was, or why I should trust either source.

Thanks for the informative post. That clears things up.

I think I have found that page in the past, but back then I was just searching for some help with X.

Now here's my concern: I have no idea who Deadbeast is (There isn't a top level page -- which is wierd), how do I know it's not just wishful thinking?

If there was some link on debian.org's FAQ to the Deadbeast FAQ, then I would be less confused.

Although, I see Branden's page has alot of these links.

Because the XFree86 relicensing came at a time when Debian was trying to stabilize its XFree86 packages for the sarge release, there was some question among Debian's X Window System package maintenance team (the "X Strike Force") -- and much speculation among Debian's users -- as to what direction Debian would take.

There was never a serious proposal to attempt to ship anything other than XFree86 4.3.0 in sarge, so work on that continued while discussion on the debian-x mailing list took place. The following represents the consensus reached by the X Strike Force, without objection from the mailing list subscribers (among whom number many interested Debian developers and users).

In June 2004, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, the XFree86 package release manager for Debian sarge and sid, started a thread to discuss the future of X Window System packages in Debian for an open discussion between users and the Debian package maintainers.

The discussion spanned nearly one hundred messages from over a dozen participants, practically all of it constructive and very useful to the Debian maintenance team. The outcome of the thread was farly clear to everyone: Debian will move away from the XFree86 tree as soon as possible after the upcoming stable release due to its license issues (see above).

The XFree86 package maintainers are committed to providing support and assistance to the Debian Security Team for the XFree86 4.3.0-based packages than Debian will ship in sarge. That is, our abandonment of the XFree86 Project, Inc., as an upstream source of code does not mean that we will abandon our commitment to the users of our production release.

Futhermore, there was near-consensus that Debian should switch to the X.Org source tree, with the goal of migrating to the modularized tree over time. We expect that the monolithic X.Org distribution will be modularized in a piecewise fashion; as that happens, we will "switch off" the building of packages from the X.Org monolithic tree in favor of the modularized components that become available from freedesktop.org.

While moving from XFree86's monolithic tree to X.Org's is a relatively simple technical transition of itself, the transition to a fully-modularized set of packages will take longer -- indeed, an unknown amount of time which depends on the speed of upstream's progress -- but we expect the process will bring the packages' quality to a higher level, thanks to the introduction of a fast release cycle for each single component. We expect to "modularize" two parts of the X.Org distribution immediately: XTerm and Xprt (the XPRINT server). XTerm is independently maintained by Thomas Dickey, and the xprint.org version of Xprt is already separately packaged in Debian.

With these changes, it will also be easier for the Debian user community to have a broader choice in X servers. At present, the Debian XFree86 package maintainers intend to support only the XOrg X server (which is based on XFree86's). The X Strike Force does not plan to discourage other people from packaging others. Debian developers that file intent-to-package notices (ITPs) for other X servers are asked to strictly cooperate with the X Strike Force to maintain similar packaging standards, simplify the bug handling on shared components (like X libraries) and discuss future changes and improvements.

As of this writing (March 2005), packaging of the X.Org X11 distribution is underway in the X Strike Force's xorg-x11 Subversion repository.

This section of the X-strike force FAQ explains the plan. The linked thread contains your answer, but my summary sees: some technical refactoring issues and some license issues.

See here for info on why it's not in unstable.

Basically, it's just like others have said - they're waiting on sarge to be released. But this is straight from the horses' mouth, so to speak.

It's changed a bit from what it used to be - namely, after sarge being released they were going to wait until the modular version of X was released. They've changed that to say they'll be moving to the monolithic tree and gradually going modular (with a couple exceptions that are modular already in debian).

Note that if you hunt around, they are working on the X.org packaging and testing - it's not in the main repositories, but you can get the beta stuff now if you look for it. Might be something to try on a spare workstation.

http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/trunk/de bian/local/FAQ.xhtml#debianplans

The X Strike Force

To sum it up, Debian is maintaining it's own tree of Xfree86, without any material that has the new license, but with some x.org and other patches. This is what will be in Sarge.

It will certainly be interesting to see how many of these patches now get in.

The Debian X Strike Force produce a packaged version of X which runs on more platforms than the native version, seeing those patches folded in would be wonderful news.

Troll.

i should have included this URL

Debian XFS

Xfree86 4.0.1 deb packages are here . They arent apt-getable yet, and are not even beta by debian standards. But I have had good luck with them (except the font server, which seems to crash on init every time) on a geforce card with the binary nvidia drivers.