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President of the XFree86 Joins Precision Insight
franklamonica writes "David Dawes, one of the original founders of the XFree86 Project, and
its President for the last seven years, has decided to join
Precision
Insight Inc." PI has been heavily involved in extending XF86 to include top notch 3d support, and releasing their code back into the XFree86 code base.
Actually, Precision Insight has been trying to open up our development process as much as possible. We've recently setup a site on SourceForge called dri.sourceforge.net that has the latest public XFree release and ALL our development. In fact, it is our primary CVS repository at this point.
So, I hope you see that PI is trying to not only do open source development, but also do it in as open a development model as possible.
- |Daryll
David will be doing pretty much the same work as he did before. His first priority at Precision Insight is to get XFree 4.0 out the door.
- |Daryll
PI has put together a development team that consists of some of the most
respected engineers in the open source graphics development community.
Many people have expressed an interest in knowing more about PI and its
goals as an organization, and I'd like to offer this explanation.
PI views itself as a support arm of the XFree86 Project which serves as
a bridge between commercial interests, and open source developers. As a
commercial Independent Software Vendor (ISV), PI is directly responsible
to its clients to meet their product release dates and their quality,
performance, and support requirements. That culpability allows PI's
clients to offer those assurances to their own OEM customers, removing a
major perceived impediment for commercial companies in using open source
software. Red Hat Inc. was the first open source software company to
contract with PI. They have funded development of NeoMagic drivers and
drivers for the Intel 740 graphics chipset. Red Hat has also funded
(with additional funding from SGI) the Direct Rendering Infrastructure
(DRI) which will be part of XFree86 4.0. Red Hat continues to fund PI
to produce extensions to the DRI, and other improvements to XFree86 and
the Linux graphics pipeline. PI's Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV)
clients include 3dfx, Intel, ATI, and Matrox. PI will be releasing DRI
based drivers for chipsets produced by each of those companies by Q2 of
this year.
PI welcomes any software contributions to its various code bases from
any 3rd party developer so that PI's clients can receive the full
benefits of any open source free development, but PI does not generate
revenue from those contributions. In fact, PI assumes 2nd level support
liability for the code in those contributions on behalf of PI's
clients. By producing open source software (every driver PI produces is
now fully open sourced), PI can work closely with free software
developers. PI now uses SourceForge (from VA Linux) to host all of its
development work in a fully open sourced environment. PI owns no
intellectual property and it sells no retail products.
XFree86 is a non-profit corporation that is controlled by its own board
of directors. It requires that any development accepted for
distribution meets the needs of the open source community. PI is
absolutely committed to preserving its support relationship with
XFree86. PI's clients fund projects to develop software which PI
donates back to the free software community because they directly
benefit from improvements to the graphics infrastructure. That
development model allows PI's clients to focus their in house resources
on tasks that are specific to their own products, and not waste
resources on redundant development. PI's close relationship with the
XFree86 Project and with commercial companies, provides the required
bridge that allows these seemingly disparate interests to be mutually
served. There is much more information about PI and its projects
available at http://www.precisioninsight.com