XFree86 Core Team Disbands

mumumu was among the many to write with this news: "XFree86's release engineer David Dawes has announced that "a majority of the XFree86 core team has voted in favour of my proposal to disband the core team". XFree86's News Headline has a short message about it. Why, all of a sudden? What is the successor of the XFree86? Xouvert? freedesktop.org?"

Comments

Core Team Disbands

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like the "core" team weren't actually doing the development anymore, and that they felt it was unfair to be the "core" team when they weren't doing the work.

Nothing to see here folks, keep moving.

Re:Why a successor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, basically, every software project needs to evolve or it will die. And there is a lot of room for improvement in X11 ! Apple has developed a very nice system (Quartz) and even Microsoft is constructing a very modular and IMO quite interesting Avalon system. There are some good techniques in there that will benefit the entire X11 community.

Re:Why a successor?

[Xtifr]

Yes, and when it says, "the core team was no longer representative of the active, experienced and skilled XFree86 developers," it actually sounds like they might be opening up the project a little more, rather than disbanding it. Given some of the negative comments I've heard in the past about the rigidity and bureaucracy of core team, this could well be a very good thing for XFree86 overall.

Re:Why a successor?

[hankaholic]

There is nothing in it about the future of X86, which would be mine and many others big concern.

Did you read the post? It basically said that the people involved in the "core team" aren't the ones driving XFree86 development.

Given that statement, why would you ask them to describe the future of XFree86, which is something over which they explicitly announced that they don't have control?

Re:Full text of email & analysis.

[Tassach]

The abundance of abandond projects on Sourceforge would appear to disagree with you

Do you think, perhaps, that the reason there are so many abandoned projects is because they suck, are irrelevant, outdated, or duplicative? How many half-assed winamp clones does the world need? Do we really need 2000 different email clients, or yet another piece of desktop eye candy?

Open source development is a Darwinian process. The strong prosper and the weak either die off or adapt themselves to survive in an isolated niche. If a project is so uninteresting or so obscure that it can't attract a new maintainer, then it deserves to die. The carcass remains part of the ecosystem -- scavangers are free to pick the bones for anything useful, or someone can come along and breathe new life into it.