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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?"
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
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.
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
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.