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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?"
Keith Packard is also more than aware of similiar problems. You don't start talking about a fork unless you have serious reasons to think that your fork would be better. Just forking for the sake of it just splits the developer base, and the new fork usually gets bad press and poor support. I don't think Keith Packard is stupid, and Mike Harris would seem to give some very good reasons why a fork might be required.
I'd rather not see a fork of XFree86, but if they can't solve their problems quickly then they may find their hand forced by a fork. That won't be pretty.
I think XFree86 needs a good fork. It seems to suffer from a sort of PHP-Nuke meglomania. Vendor support is massively important; if ATI is nice enough to supply patches to add support for their latest cards and latest features, it would help linux and unix in general to be nice enough to check in the patches ASAP. If vendors look upon Xfree86 as worthless to support drivers for because of inability to delegate responsibility, then X and linux in general will never reach the usability levels that we strive for.
That being said, forks are dangerous and should only be done by talented contributing people with people skills. Keith Packard is a good coder, I hope he's as good with politics.
Gnuyen
I've read Mike Harris' log entry and I agree with many of the points he brought up.
... if XFree86 wants to be more open, why did they remove Keith Packard from the core team in the first place? I know he has contributed in XFree86 that is beneficial but still, despite that he wants to fork off his own XFree86 tree, does the people at XFree86 require to know what he (Keith) intends to do with it?
But the thing is
~ Old Warriors Society
Oh and BTW from http://www.xfree86.org/developer.html
I don't know if Mike's quote from that page is old or just innaccurate.
It sounds like XFree could use some new blood. It's too bad there aren't just more active developers as it would help to steer it in the right direction. The Linux kernel is a good example of a piece of software which is ultimately controlled by Linus' inner circle, but which is really driven by the hundreds (thousands?) of other people who hack on it and release their own trees, etc. Maybe writing GUI code is boring by comparison, or something.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
XFree is old, should be rewrited from scratch, but the problem is the time. XFree works in a lot of architectures, and a lot of different hardware. Out there there are good alternatives (from a "design" point of view) like DirectFB but they run just on few hardware, and, usually, only 1 architecture. So, the problem is, XFree is too big to make forking a good idea, i think people should just make current X better without any fork. We need some standard for direct hardware access (like DRI) and concentrate work on them. Just an opinion...
Keith better be damned sure _why_ he's forking
That is almost certainly why he has been "privatly" talking to people about a possible fork. He isn't stupid, and there is no way you could fork a project like XFree86 without both internal and public backing of some sort.
Now that XFree86 Core has got its panties in a bunch and thrown Keith out, it has probably made the posibility of a fork even more likely. After all, Keithe has been one of the main drivers behing recent XFree86 development, he is passionate enough about XFree86, he has the skills to lead a fork, and he is unlikely to want to move onto something else. There is also the opurtunity to solve a lot of the internal development problems that XFree86 seems to suffer, which would be a good thing.
Now having said that, I hope that Keithe does not fork XFree86. Its a big project, and could simply cause a fabulous split in the developer base. That would be very, very, very bad.
...is one that constantly seeks out new talent and includes their efforts in the project. One thing I've learned about managing (FSVO) an open source project is that the worst thing you can do is to ignore people's contributions. Heck, if Mike's diary entry is still the state of affairs, there are more people with commit access to the Hercules CVS repository than there are XFree86, a project that's probably two orders of magnitude bigger!
No wonder people are getting frustrated. Perhaps a fork is in the best interests of the XFree86 project.
I'd be interested to hear Keith's side of the story, especially his concerns. If they're correct, though, and he's only willing to discuss them with a handpicked developer community, I doubt we'll hear anything useful.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
"Can't ATI just release their drivers themselves?"
I was wondering the same thing. Are XFree86 drivers modular? If not, why not? And if not, then XFree86 is severely broken and badly needs to be redesigned to be modular.
If so, why does ATI wait for the core XFree86 team to (months and months later) even look at the possibility of including its drivers?
I'm not familiar with XFree86's internals, but my guess is the former (XFree's internal architecturer is broken). If it were the latter, then this whole thread would be brainlessly moot.
If a fork will improve the system, then I'm all for it.
I think the first response on the xfree forum says it all.....
What specifically does the XFree86 bod see as being wrong with the idea of a 'by-invitation-only group' managing X server development? Isn't that exactly what the core team & xfree86 BOD have been doing all along?
Maybe the core team & bod could explain what is being hinted as a new spirit of openness and how that is proposed to effect the XFree86 development process and strategy? Will it mean forinstance an end to the sort of behind-closed-doors discussions that appear to have lead to this announcement?
The binaries for XFree86 are over 70MB in size, what on earth are they putting in there? Maybe it is time to fork this project or start again from scratch and apply modern design techniques. How about modularising the engine? Why do you have to download every driver for every stinking card out there when you only have 1 video card in your machine? This thing's bigger than early versions of Windows, and it's only a display driver. With a modular design the individual companies could produce their own driver which could simply drop into the main X engine. That would free up the developers from worrying about approving all the patches from each of the major vendors, and they could concentrate on writing some useful core software.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
A forked tree would basically kill X as a _standard_ platform. If I write an X app, do I write it for XFree86 or XFree-KiethP?
Considering that I can run every Linux app imaginable using a completely non-XFree86 X11 server on Windows (XWin-Pro, Xceed), I'd have to disagree with you there. I'm sure the KDE team didn't "write KDE for" XWin-Pro, but it works fine. Also, there are non-XFree86 X servers for Linux that work great, one of which I can't remember the name (it's a commercial server).
X11 is the standard. XFree is just an implementation of the the standard. Similar to HTTP is the standard, but Apache and IIS are implementations.
I don't know a single app that targets XFree directly. They all target X11. The apps may take advantage of XFree86 features, but run on any other X11 server. The same will be the case if they fork.
But as the development in XFree is rather slow, and at least my impression is that all feature-improvements in the last 2 years have been partially or completely done by KeithP, I doubt that anyone would still bother to use XFree in another 2 years...
I'm not deeply clued in to XFree politics, but my off-the-cuff impression is that this would be a good fork. XFree, for all it's great qualities, could definitely be more forward-looking, especially in the rendering area (i.e., aa, subpixel, alpha etc) Keith's speciality. I don't know how it might work out, but it would be nice to see more competition/openness on the display driver front as well, especially 3D, and especially, 3D used for 2D rendering, which I'm sure Keith has some ideas about.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The whole strength of the open source concept is that the many hands in a community can make complex problems shallow. If forks can't happen, then a monopoly on the supply of software develops. However, within there already seems a situation in which the threat of a fork is forcing a previously partially closed community to consider how to open up more.
Don't forget that forks are considered by Linus to be essential elements of a successful project. They allow the opportunity for alternative approaches to be tried, and if successful to be adopted. The trick in the kernel is that Linus recognises this and is prepared to merge again when a fork shows its worth
This hasn't worked through yet - it may well be that the threat that it might happen allows the situation to improve such that the natural progression is to bring the two sides together again. This is an opportunity not a threat and we should encourage it
The degree of modularity that would allow vendors to plug in binary drivers would lead to vendors no longer cooperating at all in providing open source drivers.
Some would say that this goes against the spirit that XFree86 is being developed under, and would lead to the project eventually falling into becoming fairly proprietary.
I am not saying this is good or bad, but there's a political agenda behind the licensing tactic of many Open Source projects. That's how it works.
Sure there is: the hooks just aren't in the kernel. And that's the point: the kernel is not designed as a set of software components that people can assemble into a system, it's a monolithic piece of software that often needs to be patched in order to support some new piece of hardware or functionality.
And how many of them have ACPI or FireWire?
Most of the new ones have ACPI. In fact, my two year old desktop has ACPI. I suspect the majority of new laptops being shipped can't be suspended under Linux, even though the code has been donated by Intel a long time ago and works.
Linux is so much more stable than Windows because Linus is so picky and doesn't just cobble stuff into the kernel before it's ready.
This isn't about Windows vs. Linux. The Windows kernel seems to suffer from the same problem, although for Windows, they at least have figured out how to make third party drivers work a bit better. But just because everybody suffers doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.
Linus is doing a great job at what he is doing. But there is only so much any group of developers can do with a software system that is millions of lines of code and for which new components are often distributed as patches. We will have to move to a different architecture at some point; the only question is when and how.
XFree is an excellent system. For 80% of desktop work, thin clients etc it's great and I use it every day. But whatever anyone says, it is *slow*.
Try it yourself - open an X application over a browser window and resize it. See the ghosts left behind? The weird way the contents of the window redraw at a different speed to the window resizing? Change workspaces and I can see the windows redrawing.
This happens on even the fastest systems - mine is a 1.53ghz processor with a geforce2 graphics card. I would expect instantaneous redraws on a system that fast. Windows *feels* faster on a much slower machine. Of course, Windows sucks in so many other ways, but at least its graphics code is fast.
If Linux is truly moving onto the desktop, perhaps it really is time for a new look at the graphics situation.
What we actually need is a replacement for X11, redesigned from the ...), which is a shame, but it's
ground up, with compatability libs to allow normal, window-bound
X11 apps to work on it. We'd lose existing "special" apps (window
managers, screensavers, panels,
what needs to be done to allow for future improvements.
Don't get me wrong, I mostly like XFree... but the design is
(gradually) reaching the end of its useful lifespan. There are a
number of improvements I'd like to see that are fairly impractical
for a design based on X11. Resizing windows is nice, but I also
want to be able to scale them. (This implies that bitmapped fonts
should die, among other things.) Being able to grab a bitmap of
the desktop and use it as a window background is one thing, but
I really want a full alpha channel for every window (controlled
by the application for each widget in the window, or for each
pixel in an image canvas widget) plus an overall opacity setting
(controlled by the user) for the whole window. And so on.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I've been using ACPI on 2.4 for ages on my desktop, and i know a lot of people who use it on laptops. If you are having problems with ACPI chances are, your bios is broken (go read LKML on all the hacks to get bad hardware working). It's kind of hard for the developers to support hardware thats broken, and without documentation; on the other hand the good hardware gets supported. Cheers!
*sigh*
A documented and stable binary interface for drivers in the Linux kernel would be good for many reasons. The standard "reason" given by the kernel developers why there isn't one already is that that would promote the development of closed-source drivers, which are more likely to be buggy.
Linux is not my kernel. Perhaps I should write my own. However, if it were mine I'd provide that interface and let these people play ball too, in thier own way, but that's the pragmatic solution.
Who wants a pragmatic solution when we can play at politics, which, after all, is so much fun, isn't it?
Stick Men
...it is to just start planning a fork behind the curtains without _first_ venting his concerns with the rest of the XFree86 team first.
After all, it would do no harm to at least start discussing his plans with the rest of the XFree86 team. If no agreement can be reached, then two separate camps are likely to form, and a fork will be made.
If the majority agrees with his opinions problems can be solved, and there's no need for a fork.
XFree86 is one of the core packages in most linux distros, and a fork would only make things even less standard than they are today. Taking this into consideration, Packards "I don't like this, I'm not going to play with you no more" attitude is insanely childish.
Some people here seem to think that forking is unconditionally a good thing about open source development, but if everyone started forking the kernel, glibc, gcc, and XFree among other core packages, where would that leave us?
On the other hand, the fact that it's there and you know it's over 2 years old and hasn't been fixed is a vast improvement on not tracking it at all, which seems to be the problem.
I'm not sure that's such an issue: X need not be bloated with the way it works. In 1993/1994, I was acceptably running X on a machine similar to the 386 you quote.
X has some superb architectural features (since 1986!) that Windows *still* doesn't have. There's no need to throw them away.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Several cases. Personally, I use the network transparency of X daily, to use GUI apps that are being run on more than one computer *without* disturbing the desktop on said computers (and in fact, one of them isn't even running its own X server). I find this feature very useful, and something VNC and its ilk does not replace.
Also, X over a network is quite a bit faster than VNC.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
g4dget is correct. That is also the reason why Linux is faster than Windows- you are running one program rather than several that hook into each other. But what Windows loses in speed it makes up for in flexibility. Its a trade off, and each made their decision. Since Unix (and hence Linux) is essentially a server OS, graphics display are not its core concern- networking performance is.
The Windows kernel seems to suffer from the same problem, although for Windows, they at least have figured out how to make third party drivers work a bit better.
Well, for the most part. You still get flaky implimentation. For example, until its influx of 3dfx people, ATI really sucked ass with both hardware and software (and drivers). Now they unified their drivers like nVidia, and are getting some pretty stable performance: they still arent near stability of nVidia tho- nVidia cards are like a tank.
But aside from all that stuff, there are some good some bad with other graphics drivers, especially the farther down the food chain you go. But thats the whole thing- it IS possible to make rock solid third party drivers for Windows, its just some companies generally dont have people skilled enough to do so, or else the product itself is unstable.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Keith has come by PSU (I mean Portland State, not Penn.) several times to lecture in Bart Massey's AI classes. I haven't met him, but I do know some of the people involved in some of this "new X stuff." My girlfriend even had lunch with him once. Several of the people I work with were involved in pre-XFree86 X development and have nothing but good things to say about him.
My take on this is, Keith has some pretty radical ideas for changing X. At least, radical in the eyes of the XFree86 "core team." I've seen him on the lists defending his opinions, and he does so maturely and patiently, even when people don't agree with him. I think he's just given up trying to convince the XFree86 team, but he doesn't see that as any reason to abandon his development. Why shouldn't he make a fork if that's what he wants? If XFree86 didn't want this, they should have never made the source open.
For this perceived treachery, the core team whines and boots him out. Pretty stupid considering he was making considerable headway with Xrender, the only major advance in the basic graphical functionality of X in many years (excluding hardware acceleration).
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that if Keith is successful in what he's doing, there will be plenty of people running his stuff in the future, and XFree86 might become much less relevant.
Short answer: Terminals
When X was created, servers with many (ASCII or EBCDIC) terminals have been much more common than today. PCs and graphic workstations have been too expensive (either in acquisition costs and administration costs) to deploy on every desk.
And X Terminals (from NCD, Tektronics, DEC and many others) have been quite popular in Unix environments for a while.
But as we all know, the PC has won. Maybe not the whole war, but at any means the last battles.
(*sigh* Talking 'bout war is not amusing this times...)
It says that someone realized VNC/rdesktop style screenscraping is easier to implement, and wrote a GUI to control it.
In other news, it's also easier to write a note with a pencil on a piece of paper than it is to log into a computer, log into a discussion site, and type the note in. There are times when each is the more appropriate choice, depending on the task at hand.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
XFree86 -> XFree
the 86 bit is a bit of historical baggage that no longer reflects reality. Let's take this opportunity to remove it.
As an aside, I think this is a great idea. Between K.P and M. Harris, most of the linux distros will go with the new server. Yay! Real bug tracking! Yay! No long waits for ATI patches! Yay! Sane patch review! Yay! Making XFree development safe for creative ideas!
just forking for the sake of it just splits the developer base, and the new fork usually gets bad press and poor support.
:-(
I think I'm going to cry. Keith has done the most amazing stuff -- Xft, the modern font architecture -- all the really good features that I've played with recently. If he splits off, XFree86 is going to take a very serious hit.
Please, please, *PLEASE* try to work this out with Keith, XFree core. If you need to maintain more stability, think about a more unstable devel versions, or even a second "really unstable" devel tree that patches can at least enter the tree. Anything, just don't end up hating each other and refusing to share your code with each other.
Either side of such a fork would have a much weaker team. We need XFree86 so much right now, with 3d becoming important to mainstream Linux users. I appreciate all that the XFree folks have done, and asking for more seems ungrateful -- but please try to work it out without ultimatums. *Please*. The mplayer folks hang together, even though A'rpi's abrasive, because he's a really great coder, and everyone would be worse off if he wasn't involved.
Man. I feel almost as bad as when Bungie was purchased by Microsoft. The world *needs* Keith and XFree core being friends, not adversaries.
This and a war in Iraq, and it isn't even 1:00 yet. What a awful day.
May we never see th
I suspect that many of the people post here are not involved in any of the WG's anywhere. I've been involved in several of them. It's not always easy. People disagree in the WG for a variety of reasons - some technical and some not. The non techncial issues include things like financial issues (as in being employed by a major vendor), long standing friendships within the group (you are my friend therefore your ideas must be the best path), etc. My current WG is the IETF PKIX and we recently ran through and incident of threats involving custard and pie throwing. We've had a couple of other incidents that lead me to think that a split of the WG might be imminent. Much to their credit, those involved bucked up and started acting like adults with work to do. They put aside their egos, financial interests, and got to the task at hand. This doesn't seem to be possible for the XFree86 group.
People who participate in WG's do so because they are passionate. They get emotionally invested in their ideas. It's hard not to. I would imagine that any of the open source projects work in much the same way. Kicking out someone who seems have been single-handedly driving their major improvements seems foolish on the part of the XFree86 group to me. This kind of a childish knee-jerk would seem to be a sure signal that he's on the right path. It seems that he will need the latitude to explore some paths and that he wasn't getting much support from the "Core Team" in doing this.
I've taken some time to do some research on this and I would tend to agree. The current "Core Team" seems to be stuck on their own ideas. I suspect that Mike Harris feels the need to chase some of his own ideas and see if they acutally pan out into something useful. That is the best reason to fork a project. If the code base splits temporarily or permanently, then it will be for the best.
Take the long view - say 10 years. Let's play what if with the different scenarios. Will any of us care that Mike Harris stayed with XFree86 project and kept the status quo? Probably not. Will any of care if he left, created a new fork, and smoked the old project? Probably yes. Will any of care if he left, created a new fork, which produced some really good ideas that got rolled back into the main fork? Probably yes.
With the proliferation of video cards, perhaps a trade-off in favor of flexibitiy (aka more cards supported and faster driver release) would be in all of our best interests. Perhaps Linux adoption would increase if I knew that I could run the latest ATI or NVIDIA card as soon as it hit the store shelves. Card makers might be more willing to issue Linux drivers if they didn't have to reveal the inner workings of their cards in an XFree86 patch.
As more and more makes and models of video card continue to be produced, the current XFree86 design will eventually crumble under its own weight anyway. It's like me asking you for a penney today, 2 pennies tomorrow, 4 pennies the next day and continuing to raise the power of 2 each consecutive day. Pretty soon you can't afford to pay me. You cannot continue to add every driver for every card every made as a "patch" the product.
My 2 cents,
Queen BHDGary secures my bank
Wow, so that's the end of Linux then, is it? Microsoft won in the end. Who'd have thought it?
What nonsense! This is Open Source. KP can create a fork if he wishes. Eventually, either his version will win out, or the original XFree86 will win out, or both will prove to be successful projects, or they'll find some rapprochement and re-merge the projects.
It turns out that it doesn't really matter. The net result will be that in 2004, there will be a better X for Linux than in 2003. And in 2005 X on Linux will be still better. Had there been no fork, the same would have happened. This is just how Open Source / Free Software works.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Lots of whiners will immediatly say "but that will allow window borders to be (horrors) INCONSISTENT and that will CONFUSE the poor stupid users!". To that ancient "inconsistent" argument I say it is totall BS and I challenge anybody to find a real user who is "confused" by the difference between a KDE and Gnome button or menu.
I won't buy hardware that doesn't have opensource drivers if I can't help it, more for pragmatic than ideological reasons. In two years when the hardware I bought isn't the latest or when the company that built it goes under I can still have driver support for newer versions of the OS. My tv card was built by a company that went out of business. It doesn't have drivers for the latest revisions of Windows (the only OS for which the manufacturer provided drivers) but it works great on Linux since the driver's source is available and can be ported to newer versions of the kernel.
Pedro Côrte-Real.
> As an X developer and heavy user, I personally am looking forward to having an X repository with current bits and sensible organization.
I currently have problems with one of the X drivers. Attempts to get involved in the X process with a view to getting it fixed got nowhere. The process seems closed, bottlenecked and opaque.
The hardware vendor referred me to the X team to get the specs which they had previously supplied to them. I was quite capable and willing to do all the work, but it was just too hard it seems.
In the past I had no trouble getting fixes into gcc, dip, and other projects, and I am running an open source project (cobol4gcc). However the degree of difficulty with X seems too extreme, as others have reported.
While code forks are usually used in extreme circumstances, this may well be such a situation.
They get no sympathy from me, especially the ones (NVidia) that won't provide programming information for the hardware they sell us
nVIDIA can't disclose hardware details if it infringes someone else's IP or license or whatever. Or if it trashes a hardware patent they rely on (let's not red-herring on software patents)
nVIDIA support Linux within the constraints of their business. Those drivers work well for me on many machines I've been involved with. So I can't hack the source code for fun, well boo hoo, but at least I have a kickass driver. So maybe nVIDIA ought not to enter into licensing agreements with others so they can GPL their source for hardware they develop 100% in-house, as if their shareholders would like that.
90% of people who moan that they don't have it wouldn't have a clue what to do with it, 90% of the remaining 10% could understand it but couldn't do better than nVIDIA. Of the remainder, the fine people who drive Linux for our benefit, they don't sit inside nVIDIA so the latest hardware features they work out the hard way would be a year late. Go sign an NDA with nVIDIA if you're curious - I did once.
GPL is a fine thing, but it can't solve all the world's problems, so give nVIDIA a break, at least they provide Linux drivers.