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?"

Comments

X be small

[mnmn]

I'm not too sure why hes wanting to fork but there are definitely issues needing to get addressed in X, to push Linux on the desktop.

Firstly, X is bloated for a single desktop computer. I even would want the windowmanager code unified with the X code to make it quicker with fewer jumps and memory size. While a lot of people will disagree with me because their X + KDE runs smooth on their Athlon 2000, MS Windows still has a smaller and faster footprint, win95 runs on a 386 with 8mb ram if you push it. Smaller size also makes it more snappy.