Slashdot Mirror
XFree86 Gets 25k
a_little_bird informed that XFree86 will be getting the LinuxWorldExpo Community prize this coming February. That little coup will add another $25,000 to their coffers. Congrats, and we're waiting patiently for v4. *grin*
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
decided to postpone the release of v4 everytime
someone asked them about it?
Finally the XFree86 team are rewarded for their hard work. I think they would do themselves a favour by opening themselves _even_ more up, though. (Yes, yes, I _know_ you can get the source by subscribing to a mailing-list, but anonymous CVS wouldn't hurt either. I just discovered that 3.9.17 hangs my machine, and I have no idea what change causes it.)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Well, considering that the submitter, 'a_little_bird' is a kristin_deangelis@idg.com, and IDG is the one handing out the money, it seems pretty positive....
I guess that depends on who Kristin actually is....
It has been my opionion for awhile now that Xfree v4.0 is the most important part of the 'Linux' OS. The kernel is now in a pretty decent state and is very usable. 4.0 should allow more consumer oriented applications (yes, games) to be run. Once 4.0 has proven itself to be stable and fast we'll be looking at a big jump in support. For example look at all the games that have come out for Windoze once DirectX became available. I see this as a possibility for Linux if 4.0 is everything we hope it will be. Congrats on the award and keep up the good work.
Hopefully this is an opportunity to build something considerably friendlier/prettier than what they've had. Although I'm quite happy if they wait, oh, "half an hour or so" to implement it...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
As they have stated many times, the reason for closed development lists is the fact that you currently have to sign NDA's with the major graphics chip companies in order to work on XFree. The NDA's are designed to keep the programming specs secret, but they allow for source code release of the drivers. This keeps the suits at ATi, Matrox, etc.. happy, and allows XFree to run on the various cards. Up till now, this has been an OK relationship.
With 4.0, however, the driver layer has been abstracted into loadable modules, so we should see the core server functionality opening up a lot (I hope!). I for one would like to see division along the lines of KDE/Gnome, with a group of people working on the NDA-requiring drivers, and the rest of the tree open on an anonymous CVS server. This would allow more "casual" eyes on the code, while keeping the "developers" who want to devote more time as the maintainers of the various modules and subsystems.
This would also let you get daily snaps of _most_ of the stuff, with driver snaps released frequently, too, since the driver people wouldn't have to constantly wait on the core people, and vice-versa.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...