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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?"
"core team was no longer
representative of the active, experienced and skilled XFree86 developers"
That leads me to suspect it isn't XFree86 that is dying, just the current core team is giving up their posts- and probably to be reorganized with new members from among the referred to "active, experienced... developers"
I wouldn't panic yet.
Is this related to the Cygwin/XFree86 blowup a few months back?
A lot of big companies still use COBOL, and COBOL is over fifty years old, which means we can keep using X even if it's not being developed anymore. If something is worth using, then it must have a good solid base which can be used for many years to come. We don't need to worry at all for another fifty year or so, when we'll probably need a new system. Why panic now?
Many systems have lived beyond their original development schedules. Financial software written in COBOL, for example, which has caused no problems at all since it was developed, Windows 3.1 which is still more than good enough for most schools and small businesses and has no security flaws despite all thsi time, and the B programming language, which many an OS kernel is written in.
mogorific carpentry experiments
then perhaps it's a good thing as there has clearly been a fair amount of rankling lately.
Who said the core developers were stopping their work on XFree?
This brings up a good point: is anyone to maintain xFree86 anymore? Sure, the source is still available, but is the project documented well enough that another team could pick up in a year where this one left off? Interesting questions that the open source community will have to answer if proprietary source is to be defeated once and for all.
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If you ask me, xfree86 doesn't need much "inovation". It works great the way it is! Of course, that shouldn't stop other people from taking the xfree code and do radically new stuff with it. If someone manages to come up with something that is significantly better than xfree I'll be more than happy to switch.
> Why would a successor for XFree86 be needed?
it's not, that's just a bit of sensationalism thanks to herr slashdot. XFree86 is one of those applications that in all honesty has come as far as it will ever need to, and I'll surprised to see if we need any more development on it for another 10 years. Sometimes it's good to just sit back and let the good work that's been done continue, and that's what's happened with XF86
Proprietary window handlers however like windows and MAC will just keep digging themselves into the ground adding more eye candy and bloat. It's a great time to be a linux dev isn't it!!!!!!!!
(NOT framebuffer because fb doesn't work well with some hardware)
Purely out of interest, what kind of hardware does the framebuffer not work well on?
No, we need more of those people as well.
You've got to understand, that whatever your archievements are, that doesn't entitle you to behave as a moron. For example, I have great respect for Alan Cox. But, if I ever see him trolling slashdot while I have points, I'm going to mod him down.
The thing that the X team did were great of course, but lately all I've been hearing of them is that they got lazy, advertised their CVS privileges as if it was some god-given privilege, while not doing almost anything at all with it, and made it difficut for people who were at that time doing much more useful work the possibility of making it easier. I'm very glad to hear that now they finally recognized that they were only stalling the development.
Having created something Open Source shouldn't mean that you're free to be dictator of that thing. In Open Source this especially makes little sense, because the point of it is the development of a program, not the exhaltation of its authors. I remember that Linus himself said once that if he believes that Linux will advance better without him, he will resign.
Not exactly informative. I think we can say Dawes and friends are the real source of "the sky is falling" syndrome, due to the information vacum.
You can't blame people from freaking out when there is a lack of information and context!
or a place where technical discussion happens.
IANAP (I Am Not A Programmer) by any stretch of the imagination and have absolutely no idea about the nature of the core team, but a phrase like this makes me wonder if it was self destructing. Were I to hear this phrase in a business environment it would indicate to me that it turned into a political quagmire and that direction was defocused and derailed by hard lined vocal factions.
Could it be they just decided to disagree and split up because it just wasn't worth it any more?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
fragmentation could be a real concern.
Multiple X implementations for Linux is not a problem. In fact it could be an advantage. The claim that it becomes harder for vendors like ATI and NVidia to target the platform is of course wrong. They only have to support one of them. So what if we end up in a situation where ATI users will need one X server and NVidia users will need another X server? As long as both X servers implement the correct protocol. Different features of course could be a problem to some extent, but since we are talking about different hardware it's obvious, that there will be differences. If it is going to happen, I hope both forks stay open (is that required by the license used by XFree86?), at least if it is open a new branch can try to merge the two if divergence become too much.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I think we really need a new X server, dedicated to desktop use. It looks like the RENDER model is going to be the primary graphics model these days and applications expect both multithreading and lots of bitmap storage from the X server.
Yet, the existing X server originated out of a code base that highly optimized the traditional X11 graphics model and assumed a completely different mix of clients and applications. That means that a lot of complexity in the existing server is devoted to optimizing things few people still care about.
A new implementation could replace that code with simple, generic implementations and focus on making the stuff that everybody uses these days efficient.
It may also be worth using C++ for such a new X server. That's not because C++ is "object oriented", but because C++ standardizes a number of facilities that big software systems need, like exceptions and resource cleanup, but for which C has no single standard.
Actually, at the same time, it might also be good to create a second, minimal X server from scratch that is aimed at handhelds and machines with very limited resources. Some existing work on such servers is based on XFree86, but I suspect one might be able to cut things down to an X server that gets by with 100-200k of code and data with careful coding and choice of features.
I suspect many people (ie the CIO we are trying to win over) will react badly to this.
This happens all the time in both the closed world and the OSS world.
Remember the big "tiff" between Alan and Linus? It was ridiculus that the press picked it up.
Likewise, at the large companies that I have worked at are far worse than what is happening. At USWest, a VP had to be physically restrained and removed from the premise, and only THEN was fired (he was later found to have a handgun in his desk, but that little info was kinda kept quiet).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The fdo.o X server is most likely going to be the successor to XFree86, even if development of XF86 continues. They fd.o X server project is led by Keith Packard, who did a lot of the work on Render and Xft, basically bringing XFree86 into the 20th century. He is also getting help from people who really know what they are doing, like Jim Gettys. They are working on the following features:
- A core X server based on the lightweight kdrive codebase (formerly TinyX).
- Back-buffering of all windows, like OS X. This will enable OS X-style fancy window effects like shadows and whatnot.
- OpenGL accelerated 2D rendering. This is a big step up from Apple's system, because it will accelerate actual drawing via OpenGL, not just window compositing. As a result of this, there is a lot of talk about seperating OpenGL from the X server, and allowing the X server to be just another OpenGL app running on top of a low-level OpenGL acceleration layer.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not just the software, but I mean the development. It's development by committee. Look at the rapid pace of the Linux kernel--headed by one guy.
Compare to XFree86 and its Board of Directors, Consortium, Core team, etc. And then people wonder why there is frustration at the slow pace of development. I'm not even talking about retardedly simple things like RandR (a feature even Windows 95 had close to a decade ago).
"Sufferin' succotash."
Wasn't this what Keith Packard et.al wanted?
And from where did you draw that conclusion?
Keith wanted XFree to be more organised in respect to pushing new development horizons and bringing in new developers. He only started his own X server because he was forced to do so.
Keith wants to hack on an advanced X system. He would have been quite happy to do so under XFree only they didn't let him. When you have Windows users (literally) dictating the direction of a primarily *nix project, then you know there is a problem with project structure.
Don't jump to conclusions. Just because Keith 'et al' weren't happy with the way XFree was being run, doesn't mean he had an agenda.
It's not a game. Nobody won. In fact, in the short term, recent events mean that really everybody has lost. Fortunately, with the way X server is starting to shape out, we'll all have won in the future when we have an excellent X server for us to use.
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I don't really see X being that out of date. It doesn't support transparency and shadows, but aren't those things just eye candy? If it was 2005, and Longhorn had fully OpenGL-accelerated drawing with incredibly rich graphics in apps, and X was still where it is now, then yes, it would be behind. But fortunately, it looks like we'll have Longhorn's features sometime late in 2004, way before Longhorn even comes out :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...