Y: A Successor to the X Window System

impto writes "Whenever someone brings up the topic of replacing X, everyone always says that's nice, but where's the code? Well, Mark Thomas put his money where his mouth is and produced a replacement that maintains network transparency while adding many of the features that people desire from X such as alpha blending and a built-in toolkit. It still needs a bit of work to be as featureful as X but it's a fresh start that takes advantage of current technology and ideas. Read the paper here in PDF (1.7MB) or PS or grab the source and start hacking."

Comments

Built in toolkit

[Michael Hunt]

That's all well and good, but one of the reasons that X is so successful is that you can use whatever toolkit you want, and all X really is is a network-aware framebuffer.

This leads to toolkit darwinism, which has left us with essentially GTK and QT as the two dominant toolkits. Imagine if X had been shipped with Motif as its native toolkit? Who the hell would use that in 2003?

Re:more info please

[larry bagina]

Apache was originally developed at NCSA in Illinois - ie college students, gov't funding.

BSD was originally developed at Berkeley - ie college students, gov't funding.

XWindows was originally developed at MIT - ie college students, gov't funding

GNU was originally developd at MIT - ie tenured college professors stealing BSD code and relicensing it.

Linux was originally developed by a college student in Finland.

See a pattern yet?

Perl is actually an exception in that it was originally developed to scan HTTP logs to see who was downloading porn at the NSA, and Larry Wall is now employed by O'Reilly which is the number 1 publisher of perl books, does a lot of perl training, etc. so there is a business model behind it.