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XFree86 Politics
Pivot writes "Keith Packard wants to fork the XFree86 effort. 'It has been brought to the attention of the XFree86 Core Team that one of its members, Keith Packard, has been actively (but privately) seeking out support for a fork of XFree86 that would be led by himself. He is also in the process of forming a by-invitation-only group of vested interests to discuss privately concerns he has about XFree86 and the future of X. He has consistently refused to even disclose these concerns within the context of the XFree86 Core Team, which makes his membership of that team unviable. As a consequence, Keith Packard is no longer a member of the XFree86 Core Team.' The XFree86 team is trying to become more open, to combat the fork. Keith is a capable developer, having worked on FontConfig, Xft, the X render extension etc. Meanwhile, All is not good in how XFree86 drivers are being developed. Anyone remember the GGI initiative a few years back, and the uproar it caused?"
Mike Harris is a bright guy, as anyone who has followed the various Red Hat mailing lists over the last few years will know. When he speaks out like this about the inadequacies of the development process of XFree86 we should all stand up and take notice. Be sure to take the time to read the advocago link in this story.
Thats crap to put it midly. You write an X application right and it works everywhere. Please already run a huge range of X servers, including WeirdX, MetroX, Accelerated X, eXceed and the like all of which are different codebases, and WeirdX is even in a different language.
Its like arguing that you can't write a tcp/ip application if NetBSD and OpenBSD forked. The truth is that since both speak the same protocol it doesn't matter at all.