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*

Comments

Re:XFree86 is a Cathedral

[McKing]

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.