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

WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm...

Let me be the first to say,

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy fucking shit. IIRC, Apple's X11.app is based on XFree86, so what are they going to do now? Base it on Xserver, Xouvert, or (God forbid) fork it?

mumumu

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently he has no idea what this means, and well, neither do I.

Bumpy times ahead for XFree86 users?

[jjgm]

If the XFree86 project truly stalls (and judging by the way other major projects have fractured) then there'll be any number of groups choosing to fork it to develop with their own ideas. Unless they agree on an API or similar framework, this will make it hard for driver vendors like NVidia to target XFree86's derivatives as a platform.

What I predict then is multiple XFree86 fork projects springing up (a la 4.4BSD's fragmentation) and a decline in the quality and quantity of video support for Linux and the BSDs.

What I would *like* to see instead is some cooperation coming out of this. Or possibly a major vendor sponsoring, if they can keep their paws off the direction, an obvious target fork for hardware vendors to work with.

What I'm afraid of is that I will have to go buy an AcceleratedX license.

- J

Re:Doesn't really matter. Quality stays for years.

[proj_2501]

What happens when development stops and future video cards remain unsupported?

Re:Slashdot trolling?

[shane_rimmer]

You're new around here, aren't you?

Go ahead and mark this post as redundant, or even offtopic, but it had to be said.

Best of the worst

[rinkjustice]

Nobody seems to know who the core XFree86 team is, or what they do or even did and who or what is going to replace them. The whole story consists of maybe 20 lines. No answers. Nothing.

I nominate this as Slashdot's most useless story of 2003!

Re:Related to the Cygwin blowup?

[Kyouryuu]

I think you hit on a really great point though. I may not be a Linux programming expert, but in my opinion X (by which I refer to X11 and XFree) is one of the major things that's holding Linux back from widespread adoption. It is a slow and poorly designed monolith that often requires considerable chiseling and hacking in order to work with even the most simple of 3D games. And should one screw up the configuration, usually everything graphical about Linux is taken down with it. The average user has no idea what to do.

X also highlights a flaw in the Linux community in terms of open-source development models. In a perfect world, people would realize that X is a somewhat inferior means of achieving a certain end and work on a better program. I think a lot of people would agree that X is obsolete and needs to go and that action should be taken. However, we stop at words without action. Perhaps due to the sheer complexity of such a beast (or in the worst case, complexity which the X team has manufactured), no one has really stepped in to replace X with a faster, more 3D intensive implementation to meet the demands of 21st century desktops and workstations. Hence, users are content with a "good enough" solution, but not the best solution. In a sense, this creates a veritable "monopoly" in the open-source realm, a dinosaur stuck in its ways that burdens everyone else and is so ingrained that people aren't willing to take on the challenge of replacing it.

So, yes, X is somewhat akin to Internet Explorer. Options exist to replace IE, but since 90% of the world is still using it, we still have to cope and deal with it - no matter how positively ass-backwards it is. It too is one of those "good enough" solutions.

Part of this problem is X and part of this problem is the graphic card manufacturers themselves. ATI, for example, is lagging far behind nVidia in terms of willingness to support Linux (the only XFree 4.3 drivers released are unofficial). But it must be realized that these two aspects are not mutually exclusive. I would assert that ATI lags and nVidia is buggy because what they have to work with, X, is very difficult and cumbersome. Especially in light of the fact that since the Linux usage base is so much smaller than the Windows one, it's hard to argue on economic grounds why one would go through the effort of writing for X. Granted, ATI isn't doing itself any favors by insisting on using essentially closed RPM-packaged source code, but we can't keep running away from this problem and continue to graft these kludges onto a broken X. We need something entirely new.

I can only hope that, really, the Challenge problem comes into play. This is the notion that as people become discontent with the current status quo or bottleneck that attention becomes focused on eliminating it. For Linux, I believe X is such a bottleneck. If Linux is to have any hope at all of attracting the high-level 3D applications (especially games) and running them well in the future, X has to be replaced. Until then, we will only see these hacked together hit-and-miss ports, or afterthoughts from Windows game developers.

Re:XFree86 needs a serious overhaul

[Anonymous Coward]

There is evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guyis a lying cocksucker. Think independently.

Re:Is that why...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker. Think independently.