X.Org Foundation Releases X11R6.7 X Window System

Several folks submitted the press release announcing the formation of the X.Org Foundation and the release of X11R6.7 of the X Window System. The XOrg Foundation is the successor to the X Consortium, formed by many of the most notworthy participants in the XFree86 Project. This code release is a tree forked from the last XFree86 release not troubled by that pesky license change. Since Mandrake, Gentoo, OpenBSD, and Debian have already rejected the new XFree86 license, this new code tree will likely become the default X11 for most Linux users. I've attached the press release that explains more details about the code release, as well as the X.Org foundation itself. XOrg Foundation writes "X.Org Foundation Announces Formation and First Release

The new X.Org Foundation will help drive the X Window System to support
state-of-the-art desktop technologies

San Francisco, CA., April 6, 2004 - X.Org Foundation today announces their first release of the X Window System since the formation of the Foundation in January of this year. The new X.Org release, called X Window System Version 11 Release 6.7 (X11R6.7), builds on the work of the X.Org X11R6.6 and XFree86TM Project Inc. V4.4RC2 releases to combine many of the latest developments from a large number of the participants and companies working with the X Window community. The X Window System X11R6.7 release can be found at http://www.x.org/.

We have made great progress in creating a framework upon which further development of the X Window System can be based, agreed the Interim Board of the Foundation. We expect to provide the desktop community with at least two more releases of the X Window System before the end of this year to encompass all of the new technologies and ideas that we are developing.

This release marks the return to community development of the X Window System under governance open to all contributors for the first time since the founding of the X Consortium in 1988, said Jim Gettys, co-founder of the X Window System, Interim X.Org Foundation board member and member of the research staff of HP Labs.

We welcome the formation of the X.Org Foundation and are looking forward to support this group to bring the work on the X Window System to a new technological level, said Egbert Eich, X Window System developer at Novell's SUSE LINUX business unit.

Matthias Ettrich, Director of Software Development at Trolltech, said As a multi-platform GUI toolkit vendor, we appreciate the value of a powerful underlying windowing system, and as such, we are excited about the direction X.Org is heading. We are very much looking forward to supporting new technologies around X, and we will do our share to make the advances of the platform accessible to software developers.

Being an underlying technology to the most popular desktops on all GNU Systems, in particular GNOME and KDE, the X Window System is indeed an essential part of most Free Software operating systems, said Georg C.F. Greve, president of the FSF Europe. It helps many users to access and enjoy the freedom of Free Software. We are glad that X.Org will from now on watch over this enabling technology.

Red Hat is pleased to be working with the new X.Org Foundation to build a vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation. Look for X11R6.7 in the upcoming Fedora Core 2 and future Red Hat Enterprise Linux products, said Havoc Pennington, desktop development manager at Red Hat.

As one of the largest GNU/Linux distribution projects in the world, the Debian Project is delighted to see that freedom and diversity are alive and well in the X technology sector. We're also delighted that the X.Org Foundation is dedicated to retaining the licensing model that has made the X Window System an enduring success, said Branden Robinson of the Debian GNU/Linux Project. Like us, the X.Org Foundation is a member-driven organization devoted to Free Software. We cannot help but be enthusiastic about them and the work they're doing for the X Window System and Free Software communities alike.

An open source project works best with a large community of active contributors. OSI welcomes the return of X to open source development by the entire community. I'm looking forward to contributing myself, said Russell Nelson, Vice-President of the Open Source Initiative.

Cygwin/X is benefiting heavily from the community-building spirit of the X.Org Foundation and their open development environment. We are pleased to be basing our releases on the good work of the X.Org Foundation, said Harold L Hunt II of the Cygwin/X project.

The XonX Project is very pleased that the X.Org Foundation has been eager to support Darwin and Mac OS X. X11R6.7 adds new features that will be appreciated by many Mac OS X users, said Torrey Lyons, XonX Project Founder.

Membership of the X.Org Foundation is free to all participants. Applications for membership are now being accepted, and active participants in the further development of the X Window System are invited to visit: http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html to complete a membership application. Participation in the Foundations Sponsor Group is also available to those who wish to financially support the activities The X.Org Foundation. Current Sponsors include Hewlett Packard, IBM, and SUN Microsystems.

About The Foundation Release
X11R6.7 is the first official X.Org Foundation release. It is the successor release to X11R6.6 from X.Org. To assure consistency with industry and community requirements and practices, it was developed from the X.Org X11R6.6 code base and the XFree86 V4.4RC2 code base, with the addition of bug fixes and enhancements. These enhancements include: new IPv6 functionality, Freetype V2.1.7, fontconfig V2.2.2, Xft V2.1.6, Xcursor V1.1.2, and Xrender V0.8.4, with corresponding changes in documentation and notices. Additional source and binary releases are anticipated during 2004.

About The X Window System
The X Window System provides the only common networked windowing environment bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's computing. The X Window System is one of the most successful open-source, collaborative technologies developed to date and is the standard graphical window system for the Linux and UNIX operating systems. The inherent independence of the X Window System from the operating system, the network and the hardware, as well as its successful interoperability, have made it widely available and deployed with more than 30 million users worldwide. All major hardware vendors support the X Window System and many third parties provide technologies for integrating X Window System applications into the networked computer or personal computer environments including Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X. Further, thousands of software developers provide X Window System applications, and with the continued growth of Linux and the emergence of Mac OS X, the number of users is growing rapidly.

About X.Org Foundation
X.Org Foundation L.L.C. is a recently formed Delaware company organized to operate as a scientific charity under IRS code 501(c)(3), chartered to develop and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship of the X Window System technology and standards. The group is currently managed by an Interim Board of Directors that includes: Stuart Anderson (Free Standards Group), Egbert Eich (SUSE), Jim Gettys (HP), Georg Greve (Free Software Foundation Europe), Stuart Kreitman (SUN Microsystems), Kevin Martin (Red Hat), Jim McQuillan (Linux Terminal Server Project), Leon Shiman (Shiman Associates) and Jeremy White (Code Weavers). The website for the X.Org Foundation can be found at http://www.x.org/.

Note to editors: UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries. LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. XFree86 is a trademark of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other company names are trademarks of the registered owners.
$"

Comments

They're not worthy...

[checkitout]

formed by many of the most notworthy participants

Surely they must be worthy of something...

Re:They're not worthy...

[LemonYellow]

As Bill and Ted said, "We are notworthy! We are notworthy!"

Re:They're not worthy...

[RagManX]

Man, I hate when someone else beats me to the funny. I saw that, but there were already 20 replies to the story, so I lost out.

RagManX

Re:They're not worthy...

[bloodstains]

They're noteworthy, and don't call me Shirley!

Re:They're not worthy...

[connsmythe96]

You mean Wayne and Garth, right? ;)

Re:They're not worthy...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK...then how about this one:

I'm looking forward to contributing myself, said Russell Nelson, Vice-President of the Open Source Initiative.

So, I wonder if he will be adding himself to the stable or unstable branch.

Re:They're not worthy...

[ltbarcly]

Bill and Ted said "Non non non hanous" and "Bogus"

Wayne and Garth said "We're not worthy!"

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[TheRealMindChild]

Y is already used as a name for this project

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[Rhesus Piece]

Would be and was. It is taken. The Y project is off the ground, and provides it's own widgets. Interesting stuff.

great!

[dummkopf]

when i read about X11 and their licensing issues i was scared: i had noticed that redhat dropped several (for me important) packages due to the fact that they are not GPL (such as pine... no flames, please, i like it more than any other mail client cause all you need is an xterm). i was wondering what would happen with x11. now i know. and (i think) i am releived...

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You dont need an "xterm" too use pine.

Re:great!

[leereyno]

Redhat dropped pine because of ongoing security issues, not because they are GPL zealots (which they are not).

Lee

Re:great!

[pyros]

The Fedora Core development stream is already switched over to the x.org release. The test2 release of Fedora Core 2 uses it. So Fedora Core two will have kernel 2.6, X.org, Gnome 2.6, KDE 3.2.1, and SELinux (which totally sucks ass integration wise right now, and will hopefully be disabled by default when Fedora Core 2 is actually release, or I'll probably switch to Debian until SELinux actually works as shipped).

Re:great!

[Noksagt]

What security issues are ther in 4.58? I don't see them dropping openssh, despite ongoing security issues with that.

Re:great!

[oohp]

Try Mutt or Elmo instead of pine. Good console mail clients.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[nycsubway]

I guess Z is the only one left. Then they'll have to move back to the beginning of the alphabet.

Yeek.

[Emmettfish]

You'd think that with the Xiph.Org Foundation being around, they could pick a better name than 'X.Org Foundation.' Sigh.

Ugh

[TheRealMindChild]

I just really hope no distro's of mine get overzelous and change /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11R6.7

Re:Ugh

[GigsVT]

Why? Did you think they'd never come out with a new version of X?

It's stilly to rely on a directory named for a version of a program unless you want to update your software every time a new version comes out.

Re:Ugh

[ralmeida]

Not that, but... from the release notes:

> The name of the X server is Xorg, rather than XFree86.

Re:Ugh

[bn557]

or unless you want to have multiple versions of such a program installed.... think gcc 2.9 vs gcc 3.3. Then you always just keep a symlink from somewhere in the path to the one you want.

so have a /etc/X11 link to /etc/X11R6.7 and an /etc/X11R6 folder laying around for fun.

Re:Ugh

[DikSeaCup]

Besides that's what symbolic links are for - just link /usr/X11R6 or whatever to /usr/X11, set your path vars up appropriately, and be done with it.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

just link /usr/X11R6 or whatever to /usr/X11

Then, link /usr/X11 to /usr/X.
Then, link /usr/X to /usr/theMostRecentWindowingSystemNamedAfterLetter.

Re:Ugh

[just-a-stone]

not never - but hey: i'm a debian user....

Re:Ugh

[iabervon]

Given that XFree86 has been distributing later X.org versions than 6.0.0 for ages without renaming things (4.0.2, from 2000, had X11R6.5.1), I doubt they'd change anything. Things might change when they get to X11R7, but there's no sign that they're going to do that any time soon. For that matter, that would probably indicate an incompatible change, in which case you'd want to keep the last R6 around anyway for old programs.

Re:Ugh

[fooishbar]

Most of the distributors I've spoken to actually have /usr/X11R6 in their crosshairs to disappear; Debian does, when it moves to the modular tree. Mmm, getting warm and fuzzy inside.

Re:Ugh

[jd10131]

What about X12? =)

Re:Ugh

[FooBarWidget]

Did you read the release notes? There have been tons of cleanups and bug fixes.

Re:Ugh

[Inuchance]

These days, I just hit /usr/X [hit tab to complete]

Re:Ugh

[Ender Ryan]

Ignore stratjakt, he's a very well-known troll.

Re:Ugh

[FooBarWidget]

The moderators don't seem to think so. They modded him up.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Xorg will do away with the whole /usr/X11R6 tree, they've already started. And ABOUT TIME, it's completely unnecessary. X is not special enough to get it's own directory, it'll be integrated like all the other packages in a distro into the existing directories.

Re:Ugh

[Ender Ryan]

They often do, even when he's blatantly lying. Eg. he once wrote a big long post about how he had inside information about SCO's lawsuit and that SCO had a legitimate case... Instant +5, until several people pointed to his past posting history. Either he has fun trolling, or he has serious mental issues - of course, the former arguably requires the latter.

It's as if there's actually some serious astro-turfing going on here on slashdot... Either that, or there's a lot of people who have staked their careers on being MS bitches and are afraid to learn something different, so they attack it.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

> The name of the X server is Xorg, rather than XFree86.

Zorg. cool.

Re:Ugh

[MC_Cancer_Pants]

Did you think they'd never come out with a new version of X?

I don't think they'll come out with a new version. X11R6.7 X Window System is a pretty catchy name, they'll probably just patch it and keep it under the same name.

Re:Ugh

[forkazoo]

X11R6.7 X Window System II
X11R6.7 X Window System III
X11R6.7 X Window System IV
X11R6.7 X Window System IV - B
X11R6.7 X Window System IV - C
X11R6.7 X Window System IV - D
X11R6.7 X Window System IV - D - Distribution One

Seriously, we need to stop treating version numbers as institutions! They never made a System VI UNIX because everybody got used to System V, so they did System V Release X (i.e. SvR4)

Then, SVR4 became what everybody was used to, so they went to decimals! SVR4.2 EGAD.

It is damn well time for X12. Think of the children!!!

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not.

But even if they do, you've never heard about symlinks, right?

Ah..

[Rhesus Piece]

Ah, I love the smell of forks in the morning. Hurrah for vitality.

Re:Ah..

[Anonymous Coward]

>Ah, I love the smell of forks in the morning. Hurrah for vitality.

Stick a fork in XFree, I think they are done for now.

Re:Ah..

[ckaminski]

Hurrah for Freedom.

whats new - the releasenotes :-)

[aeneas]

http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.7.0/doc/RELNOTE S3.html

And some people have a bad feeling..

[Pivot]

-after all this...

Re:And some people have a bad feeling..

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder a fork was needed... Not like current XFree86 developers look as the most motivated people in the world.

Re:And some people have a bad feeling..

[Crazy Eight]

No wonder a fork was needed... Not like current XFree86 developers look as the most motivated people in the world.

You might not be referring to Vojkovich's response, but IIRC nVidia was making some in-house improvements to XFree86 that would show up in their drivers (xaa and xrender, I think) and hopefully get folded back into XFree86. In other words, (provided I'm recalling this correctly), Vojkovich felt the same things that Packard and the Cygwin maintainer felt. The developers have been motivated, but the organization wasn't allowing them to implement their improvements.

Re:And some people have a bad feeling..

[Anonymous Coward]

What Vojkovich actually said was:

It started when Keith and Jim decided to pressure the XFree86
project on behalf of Linux distributions who felt that the XFree86
project wasn't acting in line with their business plans.

There are companies who make money from bundling up software
that they didn't write, yet don't feel that what they've gotten
will allow them to compete with Microsoft the way they'd like.
After seeing the courses of action that those parties have decided
to take, I realized that it would become more and more unlikely
that I'd be happy working in such an environment. This is my
hobby. I don't do it for any religious or political reasons.
When it become for aggravating than fun, it's time to move to
another hobby.

Reading this, it appears that he wasn't agreeing with Packard, he was actually annoyed with him and the pressure to modernise XFree86 by Linux distros.

Re:And some people have a bad feeling..

[Crazy Eight]

What Vojkovich actually said was:

"It started when Keith and Jim decided to pressure the XFree86 project on behalf of Linux distributions who felt that the XFree86 project wasn't acting in line with their business plans."

"There are companies who make money from bundling up software that they didn't write, yet don't feel that what they've gotten will allow them to compete with Microsoft the way they'd like. After seeing the courses of action that those parties have decided to take, I realized that it would become more and more unlikely that I'd be happy working in such an environment. This is my hobby. I don't do it for any religious or political reasons. When it become for aggravating than fun, it's time to move to another hobby."

Reading this, it appears that he wasn't agreeing with Packard, he was actually annoyed with him and the pressure to modernise XFree86 by Linux distros.

Agreed. I've requoted your post entirely to ensure it is seen if it isn't modded out of anonymity. Clearly, my original interpretation spun in opposition to truth of the matter.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[joib]

Umm, why? In the brave new world of Unicode, there are lots of symbols to choose from, albeit unpronouncable.

A bit like Prince, you know?

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[squiggleslash]

Why? I personally look forward to being able to run [ on my laptop...

mutt?

[Jason Straight]

Have you tried mutt?

Re:mutt?

[Rakarra]

I like mutt and use it regularly.. unfortunately mutt's complete insistance on not building in an agent that can talk to SMTP servers like just about every other modern mail client in the world is a pain. It insists you use sendmail or some other MTA, yet I've never found one that is easy to set up and doesn't trip spam filters. Sendmail insists on leaving its grubby fingerprints all over the mail headers, and since my desktop isn't an approved mail server (not to mention my ISP never set up DNS properly for it), mail silently gets discarded by a small but growing number of mail servers (most notably, Exchange servers). All because the initial mail server is one sitting on my desktop, not the one my ISP uses.

Re:mutt?

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: *smarthosts*.

Re:mutt?

[Oopsz]

You don't need a full blown MTA, try ssmtp. It takes your messages, contacts your ISP's SMTP server, and sends it on its merry way.
Here's a guide on how to set it up (ostentiably for cygwin, but its similar for linux).

Like there wouldn't be a /usr/sbin/sendmail interface for home users...

I'm all ears

[somethinghollow]

As soon as Gentoo gets an ebuild, I might revive my desktop cum Linux server back to a desktop to give it a shot.

While they tout all kinds of new features that OS X users would be interested in via XonX, they certainly don't mention what those features would be. I guess I'll have to go check the changelog. Damn.

Re:I'm all ears

[PostConsumerRecycled]

I just checked, there's already an ebuild for it for x86, though you will need ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

My laptop will be getting this tonight.

Re:I'm all ears

[Anonymous Coward]

In my hungover state my eyes picked out the words 'Linux' 'back' 'cum' 'shot'. No I won't go there..

Licenses.

[imbaczek]

Why so many people think that GPL incompatible == not free? How is current XFree86 license non-free? Yeah, I know it's not about free-as-in-beer, but how isn't XFree free-as-in-speech?

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so many people think that GPL incompatible == not free? How is current XFree86 license non-free? Yeah, I know it's not about free-as-in-beer, but how isn't XFree free-as-in-speech?

This was discussed ad nauseum in the previous Slashdot articles about this, such as the one linked to in the story, above.

But to spoonfeed you the gist of it, since you're not going to get off your duff and read the previous discussion: it's not that it's not a free license. It's the practical ramifications of being incompatible with the GPL that are the issue. It's the opinion of some lawyers and legal-types that the GPL incompatibility means trouble for software that's built upon the XF86 framework and therefore must be consistent with the terms of the XF86 license. To build GNOME, KDE, etc. against XF86, and then release them under the GPL, would violate the terms of the XF86 license, since the GPL permits things that the XF86 license does not.

For more, see the previous stories.

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

Except that the XFree86 libraries, you know those things that actually links to GNOME and KDE, aren't under a new license.

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[Lussarn]

The problem isn't that the license isn't free enough. The problem is only that it isn't compatible with GPL. This is bad because GPL apps can't link with it (Yes I'm aware that xlibs still is old license, but who knows in the future). The GPL is as much to blame as this new license. The easy part about the GPL is that it is one license (You cannot add or remove from it and call it GPL), it also makes it impossible to add advertising clauses.

Maybe the GPL is not flexible enough but as it is now thats the way it is. XFree should have calculated the pure force of GPL before the license change, now they got a fork instead.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

This, also, was discussed the last time(s) around.

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

(Yes I'm aware that xlibs still is old license, but who knows in the future).

And who knows that the X.Org libraries won't be made GPL incompatible in the future? At least with the XFree86 libraries, we know David Dawes is willing to compromise for the sake of the communitty.

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the XFree86 libraries, you know those things that actually links to GNOME and KDE, aren't under a new license.

Perhaps NOW they aren't, but the new license is considered the official one. XLibs using old license are expected to change to the new one.

Consider that if distributions as Redhat or Debian, or people like Stallman say there *is* a license problem there, you'll have to do a pretty exhaustive work to prove the contrary better than them.

Re:Licenses.

[molarmass192]

... the GPL permits things that the XF86 license does not.

That's true but you're hiding the reason. The crux of the matter is the new XF86 license imposes a new advertising clause that *imposes restrictions beyond* the scope of the GPL. The GPL forbids additional restrictions (sec 6) and, in 50 words or less, that's why the licenses are considered incompatible.

Re:Licenses.

[womby]

because then it will be forked once more

Re:Licenses.

[be-fan]

The X.org folks have taken explicit steps to make sure that X remains DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) free. David Dawes has taken steps to make parts of XFree86 DFSG-nonfree.

Re:Licenses.

[be-fan]

Its not so much a matter of GPL-incompatible == not free, but a GPL-incompatible component being a central part of a overwhelmingly GPL system. The kernel is GPL'ed, the gcc toolchain is GPL'ed/LGPL'ed, GNOME and KDE are LGPL'ed, GTK+ is LGPL'ed, Qt is GPL'ed, Mozilla and OpenOffice have GPL as one of their licenses, etc. GPL-incompatible software in that environment is just not appropriate.

Re:Licenses.

[tacocat]

Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?

Re:Licenses.

[J. J. Ramsey]

David Dawes has played a bit coy, however, on whether the new license will eventually get applied to the XFree libraries. He could pull the rug out from under us later.

Re:Licenses.

[Bootsy Collins]

Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?

Hi. You've got two independent issues here.

First of all, your statement about nonfree in sarge isn't exactly correct. The developers recently held a vote about this and voted to reaffirm their support for the nonfree section of the archive.

Second, you are right that XFree86 is on the outs with Debian. At least, that's my understanding. Putting it in nonfree is something I never thought about, and I suppose it's possible (maybe if there's a DD here, he/she can say whether it is or isn't). But I'm not sure what the point would be; if all the GUI apps in main are built using the libraries from an X.Org release, what would you use an XFree86 in nonfree for?

Hopefully, a DD will step in and comment if I've missed something here.

Re:Licenses.

[kbmccarty]

Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?

Sorry, but your first sentence is completely wrong. The amendment to remove support for non-free in Debian didn't even get a majority, let alone the 3:1 majority it would have required to win. See these links: Debian Planet, official Debian vote results.

It is true that no one on Debian's X Strike Force has intentions to package any of the XFree86 releases that the new license is applied to. But since Debian is an entirely volunteer project, conceivably a developer who really wanted to embark on this thankless task could do so, although the packages would probably have to go into non-free.

sigh, so much for moderating this discussion...

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except things like the Render libraries which were changed to the new license.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a Dawes/XFree fan, but your message is FUD. When you get right down to it any open source author could "pull the rug out from under us later".

Re:Licenses.

[fooishbar]

Yes, but the problem lies with GPL drivers, such as, oh, the Synaptics touchpad driver, which is useful in the rare case that you actually own a laptop. The legalities of loading a GPL module from a 1.1-licensed server are questionable at best, non-existent at worst.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bugging me. How is GPL "free" as in whatever it's said it's free in as, if it only allows a very restrictive set of "GPL compatible" software to go with it? Just saying that you must put an acknowledgment in the docs if you redistribute XFree shifts it from GPL compatible to GPL incompatible? Seems like a "free" as in "my own custom version of free" to me.

Re:Licenses.

[OrangeTide]

GPL is a annoying license. XFree's new license is far more reasonable than GPL.

I for one won't be using the forked version, except to port stuff back into the X Consortium version.

If everyone is going to play political games with this then I will play for the right side instead of the zealot side.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, and that's what Dawes is trying to prevent. Unfortunately there's an underground movement to add GPL components to X, with the eventual goal of forcing the entire distribution to be GPL.

Note that an end user could still load the touchpad driver, but Linux distros might have trouble shipping it.

Re:Licenses.

[rembo]

Putting XFree86 in non free would mean that all software which depends on X would have to move to contrib. That is unacceptable. But The main issue isn't about freeness, but about that it is not legal to link something like VNC which is GPL with the new license.

Re:Licenses.

[rawshark]

And who knows that the X.Org libraries won't be made GPL incompatible in the future? At least with the XFree86 libraries, we know David Dawes is willing to compromise for the sake of the communitty

This is FUD. If X.org's license can be changed to be GPL-Incompatible, so can any other project, so your argument can be applied to any X Server, or any Open Source Project.

And when and if that happens, we'll just do what we did here, take the code from before the license change, and run with it.

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

As could the Xorg developers. What's your point?

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

Perhaps NOW they aren't, but the new license is considered the official one. XLibs using old license are expected to change to the new one.

Since you know so much, perhaps you'd like to tell us when this is expected?

Consider that if distributions as Redhat or Debian, or people like Stallman say there *is* a license problem there, you'll have to do a pretty exhaustive work to prove the contrary better than them.

See, I prefer to do critical thinking myself, rather than depending upon others to do it for me. You should try it sometime.

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

If X.org's license can be changed to be GPL-Incompatible, so can any other project, so your argument can be applied to any X Server, or any Open Source Project.

How is it FUD? It's not fear or doubt. It my be uncertainty (since the future of any project is uncertain), but it's still true. Any open source project could, in theory, change it's license at any point.

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

$ wc -w
That's true but you're hiding the reason. The crux of the matter is the new XF86 license imposes a new advertising clause that *imposes restrictions beyond* the scope of the GPL. The GPL forbids additional restrictions (sec 6) and, in 50 words or less, that's why the licenses are considered incompatible.
51

Nice try.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you know so much, perhaps you'd like to tell us when this is expected?

No, you are unworthy of me sharing my wisdom :P

See, I prefer to do critical thinking myself, rather than depending upon others to do it for me. You should try it sometime.

Oh, so you aren't depending on the XFree86 team not changing the xlibs license. Now *that's* critical thinking.

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

No, I'm not depending upon Redhat, Debian, or Stallman to tell me whether or not there is a licensing problem. I can make that decision on my own.

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

"See, I prefer to do critical thinking myself, rather than depending upon others to do it for me. You should try it sometime."

Ah, but the skill required here is research, not critical thinking. And no matter how critically-injured your thinking is, they did the research and you didn't.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not depending upon Redhat, Debian, or Stallman to tell me whether or not there is a licensing problem. I can make that decision on my own.

Then read the facts. There is *definitely* a licensing problem, as you can read on some insightful comments here, or most declarations from neutral parties as Debian.

But I guess I'm talking to a wall, since you already admitted the license is problematic when you said the xlibs don't already have that license, and that is good.

Now, if you prefer to think the XFree86 developers will stop here, go on. I prefer to trust people who have expertise dealing with licenses, and take legal problems seriously. Not a core of developers who have made people involved in X Window for decades leave the project.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

And at that point we'll fork from just before Xorg changes the license, and continue with Xfoo.org. That is the point. Right now, Xorg has all the mind share and developers who actually do stuff (i.e Keith Packard, name one note worthy feature of XFree86 during the last, say, 4 years, that wasn't by Keith), it is inevitable that it will replace XFree86 as the defacto X implementation.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dawes has proven himself to be a jackass though.

What is free/unfree? It's grey. GPLv2 and new-BSD are free, EULA is unfree, somewhere in between, there's a line in the sand. Dawes decided to drag XFree86 toward the line and see how much crap he could get away with. It turns out, he didn't get away with anything and his little stunt earned him some time to himself.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your claims are complete bollox. (I'll assume you're trolling, so I won't put any effort into this post.)

Re:Licenses.

[Bootsy Collins]

Putting XFree86 in non free would mean that all software which depends on X would have to move to contrib.

Not if that software is built upon the X.Org libraries etc., rather than the XFree86 base, which is what we were talking about (and why I said what I did about how, if Debian were using X.Org instead, then there's not much point in moving XF86 to non-free because there's not much point in keeping XF86 around at all.).

But The main issue isn't about freeness, but about that it is not legal to link something like VNC which is GPL with the new license.

Yeah, that I'm aware of. We were considering something else.

Re:Licenses.

[krmt]

Well, the major Debian-specific discussions about the new X license were in reference to the X-Oz license, which is very similar. The representative for X-Oz was very unclear about the questions that the Debian Developers had as to how the license applies, so the current decision that the X-Oz license, and by proxy the XFree86 1.1 license are not DFSG compliant would have to stand. Note that the representative said she would get back to the list after a week. This was about a month ago. As a result, the packages would likely have to go in to non-free unless some sort of clarification on the license could be achieved.

This is the basic ruling on the X-Oz license as it stands now, and a following email in the thread lists the differences between X-Oz and the XFree86 1.1 licenses.

Re:Licenses.

[J. J. Ramsey]

"As could the Xorg developers. What's your point?"

While the Xorg developers could theoretically put their X implementation under a GPL-incompatible license, it would take a sea change for that to happen. Not only have they made the effort to provide a viable GPL-compatible alternative to XFree86, but it would be against the interests of several of the Xorg members to change the license to something GPL-incompatible.

On the other hand, David Dawes has been non-committal about keeping the XFree86 libs under the old license. He might very well put out a XFree86 4.4.1 that was completely GPL-incompatible.

*That's* the point.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

That we don't trust him

Re:Licenses.

[RedWizzard]

Dawes has already pulled the rug out once. He backed down on the license change to the libraries but still stated that it might happen later. I'd rather trust the groups who have done something about the situation than the group who has caused the situation.

Re:Licenses.

[steveha]

The amendment to remove support for non-free in Debian didn't even get a majority, let alone the 3:1 majority it would have required to win.

True. It's understandable: I think most of the people who voted against it figure "Debian is great now, why mess with the formula".

RMS and other hard-core free software believers are annoyed that non-free is under the same umbrella organization as the free software, but I think most people who want only free software are content just to leave non-free out of sources.lst.

steveha

Re:Licenses.

[Reemi]

Trust

Re:Licenses.

[dinivin]

But The main issue isn't about freeness, but about that it is not legal to link something like VNC which is GPL with the new license.

Only if a judge and/or jury can be convinced that dynamically linking is creating a "derivative work," which would be quite a stretch.

Dinivin

Re:Licenses.

[timmarhy]

this is a perfect example of the power of open source. you can't be locked into anything, you can just fork.

Re:Licenses.

[Flower]

The problem isn't just with linux distributions as can be seen here.

Re:Licenses.

[N1KO]

A large amount of the developers work for companies involved with Linux (all of them?). I don't see why they would want to change the license.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you know so much, perhaps you'd like to tell us when this is expected?

Never. There won't be time for that.

XFree86 is DEAD. Dawid Dawes has singly handedly slaughtered the project. Hope he's suitably proud of himself. Great job.

Re:Licenses.

[samrolken]

Putting XFree86 in non free would mean that all software which depends on X would have to move to contrib.

Oh, that would be horrible. Someone should make a Free fork of XFree86 so that doesn't have to happen. Like, maybe some kind of "Foundation", maybe called X.Org. And they should release software.

Re:Licenses.

[rembo]

Three times hoorah for sarcasme. Not sure what your problem is. If you don't like it, don't use debian.

Re:Licenses.

[samrolken]

My point is that if Debian uses X.Org's X11, then they won't have to fall back to your doomsday scenario of all X-based applications going into contrib wouldn't happen.

Oh, and I'll use Debian, thanks.

Re:Licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

If X.org's license can be changed to be GPL-Incompatible

Stop right there. X.org doesn't have the copyright on most of the code it's using, so it can't change the license. Although it could switch to different X code like the new Xfree86.

Re:Licenses.

[rembo]

Ok. I tried to explain what the reason was for doing exactly that. And I use debian myself too :) Cheers.

Damn...

[dargaud]

I had been happily downloading my cygwin updates when this news came out on /. I looked at where the installer was: xorg-x11-6.7.0.0-1.tar.bz2 !!! It's announced today and it's already up for download in the distros ! Maybe that's why this 16Mb download is taking forever...

Re:Damn...

[RagManX]

Thanks for the info. I haven't updated my Cygwin in a few weeks. Guess I'll have to hit the update now. Wootar!!1!

RagManX

Re:Damn...

[dargaud]

Wait till I finish !
Or use a different mirror...

Re:Damn...

[yawehseeker]

It's announced today and it's already up for download in the distros !

If I'm not mistaken, fedora has had packages of xorg for a couple of weeks now. I had some major dependencies issues when I tried to update and found out on the mailing list that it was due to the new xorg packages. I had to install those first before I could update to the lastest KDE. FC2 Test 2 should have xorg as well but I don't know for sure as I have just been installing the updates since Test 1.

Re:Damn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, FC2 test2 comes with xorg-x11-0.0.6.6-0.0.2004_03_11, I guess a pre-release which will be updated shortly. Works ok so far.

Re:Damn...

[MrBlue VT]

I too have updated to the latest Cygwin/X Xorg stuff. I noticed in the release notes that this was included:

Initial version of indirect 3D acceleration by mapping GLX to Win32's OpenGL implementation. (Alexander Gottwald, Harold L Hunt II)

But I can't seem to get accelerated opengl running. glxgears still uses Mesa and gets about 81 FPS. Anyone know how to enable the accelerated OpenGL? I've been waiting for this for a long time and I'm excited it's finally in there, just wish I knew how to make it work properly.

Saw something about linking with "-opengl32", but not sure where that should be done, I'd assume the XWin.exe included in Cygwin/X was built with that.

Re:Damn...

[RagManX]

Well, finished the update, and wish I hadn't. Performance truly sucks with the new version. Have to see if it gets any better with the next update, but for now, I'm going to downgrade to the better performance version of X.

RagManX

"...likely become the default X11 for most users"

[zz99]

I for one greet our new windowing system overlords!

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[rmolehusband]

Well I hear folks asking "Y Windows?" all the time so it must be getting popular.

So what's left for XFree86?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they just essentially commit suicide? Is anyone still sticking with them?

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[lurwas]

Well, it will no longer be called X in short for most distributions. It's no longer actually Free, so 86?

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[MrRuslan]

SCO Perhaps...

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[IamTheRealMike]

From the XFree86 website:

After tremendous testing and community feedback, the 4.4.0 Release is now available for twenty (yep that's the number 20!) popular platforms. Distros that are carrying it in with the license change integrated into their distribution are: NetBSD, Slackware Linux, Conectiva, and others. See our distro support page for the full breakout.

They also have an "interview" with David Dawes about the license change.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[zdzichu]

Yes, Slackware is using XFree86 4.4 since Tue Mar 23 13:07:20 PST 2004.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[zdzichu]

Also NetBSD imported XFree86 in the beggining of march 2004.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[HoldmyCauls]

Yeah, they'll be 86'd soon enough.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[petabyte]

That change is why on the 24th of March I purged Slackware from all of my machines. I was disappointed to see that but am now much happier with my current distros.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[Turmio]

Not that I care but looks like Slackware is sticking with XFree86 4.4.0.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[minkwe]

What's up with this David Dawes guy? 'cant figure him.

--

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's left for XFree86? Did they just essentially commit suicide?
The rumor is that they will remain dea.. eh, default for *BSD.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[Rex Code]

Did they just essentially commit suicide?

No. Their code has, however, been taken over by a team that's owned by HP. I'm sure they'll quickly figure out a way to make things compiled under X.org fail to run on XFree86 systems.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[Anonymous Coward]

Loser.

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[Anonymous Coward]

best post, ever!

Re:So what's left for XFree86?

[rastos1]

I wonder what is Patrick's opinion on the license discussion. How is it that he has no problems to comply but RedHat does? Did he consider other options and decided to stick with XFree86 anyway?

alphablending etc.

[CoolMoDee]

now that the xfree86 server is effectively forked, is there a chance of getting true alphablending and shadows?

Re:alphablending etc.

[be-fan]

That's in the works in the freedesktop.org X server, which is currently in development (but features like alpha-blending and shadows already work if you're interested in checking the source out of CVS). The X.org server is the 'stable' continuation of the XFree86 codebase.

Re:alphablending etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

they have explicityly stated in xserver-devel mailing list that the fd.o xserver is not intended for a replacement for Xfree or x.org-xserver. They may not be showing all their intentions right now for political reasons but this is their party line for now.

"On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Erik Harrison wrote:

>I think the poster is asking if it's primarily an experiment in
>X extensions and reimplementation, or if fd.o XServer intends to
>compete for the same ecological niche as XFree86.

'kdrive' itself is an experimental X server for development of
new experimental technology. It is useful also in embedded
systems.

>For example, pretend he is an OS vendor. A legitimate question
>of an OS vendor is "I've already got XFree86, but I like
>XServer. Is this a viable replacement?"

Right now 'xserver' is 'kdrive', and the answer is no. kdrive
itself is not intended to be a replacement for XFree86.

--
Mike A. Harris"

Re:alphablending etc.

[be-fan]

I take that to mean that 'right now...kdrive itself is not intended to be a replacement for XFree86.' That would certainly be a true statement. However, I think the overall goal is that the advancements in the fd.o X server will be mainlined when they are done. Whether that is accomplished by making kdrive a stable replacement for xfree86/x.org or whether the advancements in kdrive will be ported to xfree86/x.org remains to be seen. Remember that all the X server codebases that we're talking about are related, so if kdrive continues to remain experimental, the changes can be ported to the stable servers. Indeed, the XDamage and XFixes extensions have already been ported to X.org's CVS branch.

Re:alphablending etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but no. Any new features in X will be delayed for years by endless license bickering.

The only thing worse than a monstrous windowing system is the infighting that follows it around.

Re:alphablending etc.

[ShadowRage]

I think that's being worked on as we speak
the xserver at freedesktop.org is a playground for experimental features like those. in fact, a lot of x.org features come from there.

I wouldnt mind seing real transparency via the xdamage extension

mmmyesss.

Re:alphablending etc.

[spitzak]

There are *TWO* different things that are commonly called "alphablending" and they are suprisingly unrelated.

One of them is just the ability to draw a thing that is "partially transparent" atop another thing. You can't "take them apart" later, the only thing stored is the resulting composite. Until 2 years ago this is 100% of what people were thinking of when they said "alpha" and IMHO it is also vitally more important than the other problem, described below. This is addressed in the current XFree86 with the XRender extension. The main use you may have seen of this is for anti-aliased text, however it can also be used to draw transparent images or to draw antialiased filled shapes and curves. The XRender API is way too hard to use, so a project called Cairo is writing a new graphics library atop it to address this.

The other, UNRELATED, thing is basically "back buffer with alpha and hardware compositing to the screen for each window". This is used to make "transparent windows" and shadows. It could also be used in a much more useful way to produce shaped windows with anti-aliased edges, though I have not seen this done even on the Mac. This does not exist in available XFree86 implementations, though it is in the development versions from Freedesktop.org. It is not as far along. Unfortunatly this rather unimportant piece of eye candy is now what everybody talks about when saying "alphablending" and especially on the Mac and Windows is being used and developed much more extensively than the much more useful antialiased drawing of images.

Re:alphablending etc.

[RdsArts]

Actually, only one of the Freedesktop.org trees has alpha-blending and shadows right now.

There are two servers: Xizzle and KDrive. KDrive is Keith's experimental X server, which has all the nifty eye candy and is in general a testing ground for extentions. Xizzle is a attempt to us the GNU autotools as the buildchain for the X server. (Both use automake/autoconf, but the Xizzle branch is more stock from 4.3-r2 right now then KDrive, for obvious reasons and also because KDrive is a bit older. I think. o_O)

Daniel Stone posted a great explination of all the trees going on to his blog here

Re:alphablending etc.

[be-fan]

Not quite right:
- kdrive is Keith's experimental X server.
- Xizzle is a kdrive DDX that can load XFree86/X.org drivers.

Re:alphablending etc.

[be-fan]

Bah. You threw me off. Neither kdrive or xizzle are servers, they are DDX'es. However, its a common bit of laziness to use the word kdrive to mean X server DIX + kdrive DDX. Xizzle, however, is just the XFree86 DDX. Clear as mud?

Re:alphablending etc.

[RdsArts]

No, Xizzle is a fork of XFree86. KDrive is also a fork of XFree86. They both compile against the same DIX, as does the Cygwin X fork also housed on FD.o. The difference is Kdrive's been around for a longer time. ;)

If you read the page, it even says it plain as day:
'the freedesktop.org project has a DIX and three DDXes - Kdrive, Xizzle, and XWin. That is all.'

It may be confusing, as many are used to just having a 'server' that combines everything, but the FD.o projects are highly module, so it can look a bit 'odd' if you don't read up on all that's happening. :)

Re:more examples of Linux fragmentation

[Jason Straight]

Do your ass cheeks move when you talk? You don't seem to have a clue about a damn thing, do you?

Mandrake is not www.redhat.com for one, and it's not even the latest distro to be added to the list. Linux/Unix doesn't have a need for antivirus because it's not inviting the viruses as other OS'es do.

new X with gentoo

[soren.harward]

So, given that Gentoo is probably going to move to this version of X, how much of a pain in the neck is it going to be to upgrade?

Re:new X with gentoo

[Ender Ryan]

It shouldn't be a pain at all, as portage will handle all dependencies, just as always. And since the use flags for X is simply 'X', most people should have to change anything.

And since the "new" X is just a fork of the last "Free" XFree86, it should be no different than previous XFree86 upgrades.

That's my understanding, FWIW.

Re:new X with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running X.org's CVS from Feb 29th on two boxes since the beginning of the month. Not gentoo, built following the beyond.linuxfromscratch.org X instructions. The only problem compared to a release was that Xinerama didn't build - perfectly normal behaviour for a random CVS pull. All works fine, supports my Radeon 9200se at least as well as 4.4-rc2 did.

Looking at the release notes, it's now marginally easier to get a good host.def (e.g. it won't use its own fontconfig and freetype by default). The configure programs and the server have been renamed, and it will use /etc/X11/Xorg.conf in preference to XF86Config.

I'll be using the release in my next builds, if I can do it it's really not a big deal.

Ken

Re:new X with gentoo

[MartinG]

well, i just typed:

emerge unmerge xfree && emerge xorg-x11

I'll let you know soon if my system is totally fucked or not.

Re:new X with gentoo

[MartinG]

its totally fucked:

banana martin # emerge xorg-x11
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 14, in ?
import portage
File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 6128, in ?
settings.regenerate() # XXX: Regenerate use after we get a vartree -- GLOBAL
File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 1392, in regenerate
self.configdict["auto"]["USE"]=autouse(db[root]["v artree"],use_cache=use_cache)
File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 1121, in autouse
myresult=dep_check(mydep,myvartree.dbapi,None,use= "no",use_cache=use_cache)
File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 3309, in dep_check
mylist=flatten(dep_listcleanup(dep_zapdeps(mysplit ,mysplit2)))
File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 3052, in dep_zapdeps
myresult=dep_zapdeps(unreduced[x],reduced[x])
File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 3038, in dep_zapdeps
elif myportapi.match(x):
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'match'

Re:new X with gentoo

[mrjackson2000]

i was just reading some stuff on the gentoo forum about it this morning, there are some problems atm but it's not in the portage tree yet http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=151508&st art=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlig ht=

Re:new X with gentoo

[vthokiestm]

Once all of the kinks are worked out, it'll be a snap.

In fact, even getting DirectFB working on a Gentoo system was amazingly easy as long as your kernel Frame Buffer is working. I got it up and running with GDM and Gnome without any major bumps.

NVidia

[TheAcousticMotrbiker]

The crucial thing (for me at least) is wether or not the NVidia binary drivers will work with this new version.

Judging form the fact that's forked of XF4.4rc2 it should , but I'd like to get confirmation .

Re:NVidia

[gabebear]

I was wondering the same thing

The Release Notes say "The module loader was modified to accept either XFree86 generated modules or X.Org generated modules". I wonder if this means that the Nvidia module will work?

Re:NVidia

[EngMedic]

according to the network chatter on fedora-devel mailing list, nvidia drivers seem to compile and run just fine, even on fedora's test (beta) releases.

Re:NVidia

[vossman77]

see NVIDIA Proprietary Driver

From the X.org FAQ:

The Nvidia driver is *not * open-source, although the company has allowed an open-source driver to be developed. AFAIK The open-source driver (NV) was created by Mark Vojkovich and he maintains it himself. *This page is not for that driver. * The new proprietary driver from Nvidia is easier to install than prior versions as Nvidia has shifted to a single file for installation. They have attempted to make the setup as simple as possible with the installation script attempting to determine which kernel version you need. This has helped a lot but there are still some common problems. The best place to look for information about the Nvidia driver is Nvidia's website.

Re:NVidia

[This is outrageous!]

Well, what's for sure is that they still won't run on powerpc (12" powerbooks, low-end G5s,...). Please wake up nVidia!

Re:NVidia

[Lispy]

Rest assured, they do. I run the X.org server already, since its part of Dropline Gnome 2.6 testing. I only had to rerun the installer. No difference recognized so far...

I wish they would join wih the freedesktop.org X-server folks and bring true alpha to the desktop before redmond does... ;-)

cu,
Lispy

Re:NVidia

[Des Herriott]

Yep, I can confirm that 1.0-5336 works just fine on FC2 test2. It may be necessary to build a custom kernel, though. A couple of new 2.6.4 (I think .4) parameters cause a lockup with these drivers; you need to ensure that CONFIG_4KSTACKS and CONFIG_REGPARM are not set. This bit me with the 2.6.4-1.300 kernel.

To build a custom kernel on Fedora: install the kernel-sources package, create your .config (you can copy and modify an existing config from /usr/src/linux/configs), and type "make rpm". Let it build, and your custom kernel RPM will turn up in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS. Install that, check your Grub or LILO settings & reboot.

Now waiting for the trolls to come boiling out of their caves, holding this up as a shining example of why Linux will never make it on the desktop. To forestall them: 1) this is a test release, and 2) this is the risk you take with binary drivers. I expect FC2 final will have worked around the problem (and hopefully a newer release from Nvidia will fix it).

Re:NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

What, by developing at speeds exceeding c, creating a warp in spacetime, and going back in time to beat the release of Windows 2000?

Re:NVidia

[tiger99]

Redmond? Was that not renamed Lindows, or am I confused?

Or are you referring to an intellectually backward region on the outskirts of Seattle?

And yes, we should see these advances in *nix systems before the disfunctional monoploy, after all the X system being separate from the OS should make development faster. If not, why not? Or is it simply that no-one with the expertise is interested in that particular thing? (That is one of the few real problems of OSS, no marketing men, so programmers do their own thing. Great for job (or hobby) satisfaction, but it can leave some things undone for a while.)

Re:NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHA

win2k alpha blending

next you will pretend XP looks cool

Re:NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would join wih the freedesktop.org X-server folks and bring true alpha to the desktop before redmond does... ;-)

Um, Redmond brought true alpha to the desktop about five years ago (Windows 2000). And Apple brought true alpha to the desktop in MacOS X (I forget when that was released). True alpha on Linux would be nice, but it would be catching up, not innovating.

Re:NVidia

[gnu-generation-one]

"The crucial thing (for me at least) is wether or not the NVidia binary drivers will work with this new version."

Given the ease with which nVidia have started implementing DRM, the compatibility of binary drivers is no longer a concern for many people.

Re:NVidia

[po8]

I wish they [X.org] would join wih the freedesktop.org X-server folks and bring true alpha to the desktop...

They already have, and they are. One of the big accomplishments of X.org so far is to split the system into multiple isolated modules: you can now easily package, compile, and run the Kdrive server as an alternative to the X.org server on platforms supported by Kdrive, without affecting the rest of the X tree. Work is underway on several freedesktop.org/X.org projects to bring the Kdrive alpha compositing into the X.org server infrastructure.

XFree86

[SirNAOF]

I just read over the XFree86 license versions 1.0 and 1.1. I see the difference, but why is this seemingly minor change causing such a huge commotion with the major distributions?

Of course, some of us care more about the fact that it is still free (as in beer and in speech) than the exact wording of the license.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read over the XFree86 license versions 1.0 and 1.1. I see the difference, but why is this seemingly minor change causing such a huge commotion with the major distributions?

I don't suppose it occurred to you that someone else might have asked this question before? I don't suppose it occurred to you that the past /. stories about this, linked to in the first paragraph of Taco's summary at the top of the page, might include the answer to your question about 457,932,524 times? I don't suppose it occurred to you that you could go and look and learn about what some people think the problem is, rather than refusing to do any work yourself but expecting others to do all your work for you?

No, of course not.

Re:XFree86

[black mariah]

The whole thing is over the 'advertising clause' in te new XFree86 license. All of it is over the fact that you have to credit the author/s of XFree86 if you make something that uses XFree86 code, JUST LIKE THE BSD LICENSE. It's nothing but a bunch of whiny-ass geek bitches complaining about pedantic bullshit that doesn't fucking matter, as per usual. GPL advocates are more than happy to force their bullshit (forced source redistribution) on anyone that uses their license, but as soon as someone else uses a license that forces COMPLETLY inconsequential things on GPL users, it's somehow a bad thing.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL advocates are more than happy to force their bullshit (forced source redistribution) on anyone that uses their license, but as soon as someone else uses a license that forces COMPLETLY inconsequential things on GPL users, it's somehow a bad thing.

It's not a question of it being a bad thing -- it's a question of wanting to not break the law.

Try not to be such a dumbass in the future, OK?

Re:XFree86

[black mariah]

What law? The GPL isn't a law, the BSD license isn't a law. They're just licenses. Explain a little better before calling anyone a dumbass.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't suppose it occurred to you that being an asshole isn't neccesary? Post a link and shut the fuck up.

Why the hell would I post a link that (as I said) is already in the article text at the top of the page? Are you REALLY THAT LAZY?

Jeebus.

Re:XFree86

[SirNAOF]

So the entire argument is about being forced to give credit where credit is due?

That's fucking awesome.

Nothing is stopping me from using XFree86 on my debian box, so if they decide to stop using it, I'll just compile it myself.

So long as minor issues like this are blown out of proportion, people are going to shy away from Linux. It's a shame, too.

Re:XFree86

[bfree]

If XFree86 had been doing an exemplary job everyone would be using 4.4 with the new license and still be talking to XFree86 about it, trying to come up with a solution. Instead XFree86 had annoyed lots of developers who were working on XFree86 but outside the organisation, for example cygwin who could not get XFree86 to incorporate cygwin specific patches in any sort of reasonable manner as they would generally sit around for months before anything happened if anything did. The XFree86 development structure just doesn't seem right anymore, hence when they tried to ram a change down everyones throats without any meaningful discussion people quickly lost interest in them started building a new development model. I think it was more the prinicple of telling XFree86 finally that they can't just do whatever the hell they like and expect everyone to put up with it, that's a fact of FOSS code, your only a good fork away from death so you don't f about and encourage people to try and take your users.

Re:XFree86

[kbmccarty]

What law? The GPL isn't a law, the BSD license isn't a law. They're just licenses.

Yes, but with the current state of copyright laws, those licenses are the only things that give you legal permission to use or distribute a program. Said permission does not exist by default. So if you violate a license, you no longer have legal permission to use a program, and by definition you are then breaking copyright law.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

While others care about being able to legally run the GNOME/KDE/XFCE distributed with RH/FC/Suse/Debian on X(not-quite)Free86 4.4

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

So the entire argument is about being forced to give credit where credit is due?

No, the entire argument is about it being impossible to avoid violating the terms of one or the other license, which is a copyright violation. The argument is about not wanting to violate copyright.

You couldn't be bothered to make an effort to read and understand about it, could you?

Re:XFree86

[kbmccarty]

So the entire argument is about being forced to give credit where credit is due?

Only if you oversimplify. Here's an executive summary that I hope isn't oversimplified:

• XFree86 new license requires that people who redistribute modified versions of XFree86 include specified people in the credits of their programs or documentation.
• GPL does not require that.
• GPL specifically says that it is NOT COMPATIBLE with licenses that put restrictions on the user that the GPL does not.
• GPL applies to an entire work, e.g. a GNOME or KDE program plus all the libraries it's linked against.
• Therefore, distributions have NO LEGAL RIGHT to distribute GPL-licensed programs linked against X libraries when the libraries are licensed under the new XFree86 license.

There is nothing morally wrong with the new XFree86 license, and it is probably even "free software" or "open source" by most definitions. The problem is that it is NOT COMPATIBLE with the majority of existing free software. If the situation were reversed, most free software were licensed under what we call the new XFree86 license, and suddenly XFree86 wanted to relicense all of its code under a radical new license they called the GPL, the complaints would be exactly the same: the new license would be incompatible with the vast majority of existing open source code.

Re:XFree86

[SirNAOF]

Thank you for that explaination. Short, sweet, and to the point.

Now, the question I have to ask is this: How can the GPL apply to "an entire work"? If I write something, only the part that I'm writing (or modify) should be under the GPL. If I write something and link to another non-GPL library, and I follow all requirements of the license said library is under, why should the GPL suddenly apply to it? Just because I want to link against something under a different license shouldn't mean that suddenly that other thing is under the GPL. That's not right.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Just because I link against your BSD licensed library doesn't change the license for your library.

I'm going to have to go read the GPL more carefully before I say much more. However, if this is the case, then I can understand how Microsoft can claim that it's a 'viral' license.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the complete program can't be distributed under the GPL any more, since the complete program includes the library and distribution thus has to heed the library copyright, too.

The whole product can't be licenced consistently anymore.

Re:XFree86

[Tin Foil Hat]

If you were to link to libraries that are under a non-GPL license, especially if it's incompatible with the GPL, then you would not be (technically) able to release your application under the GPL. I say 'technically' because obviously you could include the license with the source code, but it would be unenforcable and a potential liability to your users.

Re:XFree86

[SirNAOF]

Got it. Now I see.

And, quite frankly, I find it stupid. But, whatever. I only write things for myself, and thus I don't worry about licensing.

If I ever do release anything, I'll have to look into licenses more. I don't like that piece of the GPL.

Re:XFree86

[SirNAOF]

I see how that's an issue now, thanks to the other replies.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

And, quite frankly, I find it stupid.

If I ever do release anything, I'll have to look into licenses more. I don't like that piece of the GPL.

I'm sorry? What's wrong with it?

If you link to a commercial, proprietary library, you'll have to pay, probably five figures, to distribute the application that links to it.

If you link to a GPL licensed library, you "pay" by releasing your software under a GPL-compatible license. TANSTAAFL.

If you don't like that, nobody's making you use those libraries. Find an equivalent with a BSD-style license, or pay for a commercial one, or write your own.

Re:XFree86

[black mariah]

It is the case, and that's PRECISELY why the GPL is, in fact, viral.

If any piece of your code so much as looks at a piece of GPL code, EVERYTHING must be GPL'd. This is why I personally can't stand the GPL. It's fucking hypocritical to try and defend software freedom, then go and put shit like that in your license. That isn't promoting software freedom, it's simply attacking proprietary software.

Re:XFree86

[kbmccarty]

Now, the question I have to ask is this: How can the GPL apply to "an entire work"? If I write something, only the part that I'm writing (or modify) should be under the GPL.

First, the "entire work" consisting of program + libraries is not under only the GPL, but inherits the licenses of ALL its components. If some of the licenses are incompatible (like the GPL and new XFree86 licenses), the work can't be distributed at all.

Believe it or not, there's a good reason for this "entire work" consideration. Suppose that the GPL did not treat the combination "program + shared libraries" as a single work. Suppose further that Evil Corporation Inc. (ECI) wants to use code from a GPL-licensed program, let's say Frozen Bubble, for its proprietary product. All that ECI has to do is rewrite Frozen Bubble to be a shared library, and then it can link its proprietary product to the shared-library version of Frozen Bubble (which, to comply with the legalities, ECI still makes available under GPL).

So if the GPL considered programs as separate entities from the shared libraries they are linked against, it would reduce the GPL to be equivalent to the LGPL (which DOES permit linking proprietary programs against LGPL libraries). The LGPL is a fine license, but presumably the authors of Frozen Bubble didn't want their code used AT ALL by a proprietary product, so they used the GPL instead.

Re:XFree86

[Brandybuck]

GPL applies to an entire work, e.g. a GNOME or KDE program plus all the libraries it's linked against.

Incorrect. The GPL applies to the entire work, but ONLY the entire work. It does not apply to stuff that the licensor did not create. Specifically, a KDE program under the GPL does not virally infect the X11 libraries. They are SEPARATE works.

This is particularly true with the library uses a standardize API. For example, I can use any standard system call without my work being under the GPL, even though system calls are implemented in part by the GPL Linux kernel.

Gnome runs on Solaris. Solaris ships with a GPL-incompatible proprietary Openwindows X11 implementation. Yet Sun also ships with GPL applications (like Gnome) that link to it. No one's bitching about it.

Therefore, distributions have NO LEGAL RIGHT to distribute GPL-licensed programs linked against X libraries when the libraries are licensed under the new XFree86 license.

This is also wrong. See above. Consider that I can remove my XFree86 libraries from my system, replace them with any other set of X libaries, and my applications continue to work WITHOUT a recompile! I have actually done this on a Solaris box switching between X and Openwindows.

At compile time you're linking with a standard common API. It's only at runtime when you actually link with the libraries. And the GPL specifically and emphatically does not apply to use.

Re:XFree86

[alienw]

Wrong. Linking against a GPLd library with a proprietary program is, in fact, a license violation. It doesn't matter if it's dynamic linking. The only reason you can use Gnome on a non-GPLd X implementation is because the relevant pieces are licensed under the LGPL.

If you don't believe me, go look at how Trolltech licenses Qt. They specifically state that it is illegal to link a proprietary app against the GPLd library.

Re:XFree86

[kbmccarty]

The GPL applies to the entire work, but ONLY the entire work. It does not apply to stuff that the licensor did not create. Specifically, a KDE program under the GPL does not virally infect the X11 libraries. They are SEPARATE works.

Of course a library doesn't become GPL-ized just because a GPL program links against it. But the "combined work" consisting of the program + shared libraries inherits ALL of the licenses of its components. This is at least the interpretation of GNU, as stated in the preamble to the LGPL:

When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom.

As you point out, the existence of several libraries with the same API but under different licenses weakens this claim. But I suspect most Linux distributions intend to respect it in order to take the most conservative path (legally speaking), so as not to become a test case for this claim in court.

Gnome runs on Solaris. Solaris ships with a GPL-incompatible proprietary Openwindows X11 implementation. Yet Sun also ships with GPL applications (like Gnome) that link to it.

In this case Sun is probably taking advantage of the "system libraries" exception in GPL section 3:

However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

I admit that I don't see how they are getting around the "unless that component itself accompanies the executable" clause. But in any case, your statement that the GPL applies only to an executable, and not to the combination of executable + shared libraries, is at best undecided.

Re:XFree86

[ingenuus]

It's not really about credit, but the form of the credit and technically incompatible licenses. GPL provides for credit in the copyright line as well as prominent notices of change.

From the GPL:
You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

From the GPL FAQ:
I want to get credit for my work. I want people to know what I wrote. Can I still get credit if I use the GPL?

You can certainly get credit for the work. Part of releasing a program under the GPL is writing a copyright notice in your own name (assuming you are the copyright holder). The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice.

I agree that it is a terrible shame that so many "free" licenses are subtley incompatible with one another, but such is the nature of law.

Re:XFree86

[ttrafford]

Doesn't the GPL only really apply to distribution of software? Technically, a user at home can link anything they want to.

Re:XFree86

[alienw]

Yes, but the software HAS to be distributed somehow.

Re:XFree86

[Mekanix]

... and the funny part is that RMS et al get's pissed when Linux isn't refered to as GNU/Linux.

RMS wants credit, but damn the XFree86 team for wanting the same! ;)

Re:XFree86

[ttrafford]

The post I was replying to was claiming that it was the linking itself which was illegal, when dynamic linking happens after distribution.

This is not so cut and dried when you have multiple sources of the same APIs that are licensed differently. Code isn't GPL incompatible just just because it can be linked against GPL incompatible code.

Re:XFree86

[Anonymous Coward]

The license trouble, whether or not it is as bad as it's made out to be is only half of the trouble.

There is also the fact that XFree86 board (or at least part of it) seems to be composed from developer unfriendly bastards who don't want to see any advancement.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[mst76]

> I think Y would be the next logical choice of names for the new project.

That ridiculous. The project implements an X server that understands the X protocol, just like XFree86, FDO's XServer, XiG's X server, Apple's X server and others. Why would they name themselves Y (no pun intended)?

I didn't see it in the changelog...

[karmaflux]

Does anyone know if the line

Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

is included by fucking default in xorg.conf yet?

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[dSV3Hl]

Why would it be? Not everyone has a scrollwheel on their mouse. Besides, it's wrong for some mice aswell.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be daft. What do you think this is, some sort of well designed, coherent and easy to use peice of software? You'll be wanting the ability to change your keyboard mapping and have fucking Konsole honour it instead of insisting on using a 101key American map instead, next!

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[madcow_ucsb]

Or, better yet, have it *see* what kind of mouse you have and whether it has a wheel or not and get rid of the silly section altogether.

It's one of those stupid things that's a pain in the ass for newbies who wonder why they can't scroll mozilla. And a non-functioning wheel out of the box leaves a *really* negative impression on people I've helped switch to Linux. I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.

I shit you not, when I've told people I think Linux is better, one of my friends in particular always chimes in, "Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"...

That said, I still think linux is easier in general :)

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[kugeln]

you have to use (at least on FreeBSD) imwheel.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[FooBarWidget]

On modern distributions, scrollwheel mice are autodetected. I installed Fedora not too long ago and my mouse wheel works out-of-the-box.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[bkhl]

Why would it? Not everybody uses scroll wheels, you know...

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey -- if your keyboard worked 100% out of the box, it just wouldn't be UNIX^H^H^H^HLinux.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Anonymous Coward]

No you don't, unless you're a moron.

Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
Option "Buttons" "3"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

You can make moused take over some of the magic, but there's no need.

Previously, for my TrackMan FX with the 'scroll button':

Option "EmulateWheel" "on"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "4"
Option "EmulateWheelInertia" "10"
Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"

Sadly, the X clients of the day didn't support an XAxisMapping on 6 and 7. Maybe this will change when MS popularizes the tilt wheel, because we all know nobody else makes more flexible pointing devices. :P

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Brandybuck]

"Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"

Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck around with logging in as root and changing a bunch of file permissions to make this virus effective under Windows...

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Brandybuck]

If it's such a concern for you, perhaps you could fix the code yourself? Sheesh, we're really getting nit picky here, aren't we?

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Anonymous Coward]

A regular PS2 mouse wasn't detected at all for me on a Fedora system out-of-box. Had to run mouseconfig manually.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[PianoComp81]

It's one of those stupid things that's a pain in the ass for newbies who wonder why they can't scroll mozilla. And a non-functioning wheel out of the box leaves a *really* negative impression on people I've helped switch to Linux. I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.

Sounds like you didn't choose the correct mouse during configuration. Since Mandrake 8 or so, I've never had a problem with the mouse wheel - it's always worked when I booted into Mandrake the first time after an install. I'm currently running Mandrake 9.2.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[Steveftoth]

But shouldn't X figure it out by itself nad see your mouse has 5 buttons? Windows seems to have no problem at all.

Computers are supposed to make our lives easier.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[madcow_ucsb]

Yes, that's actually correct. I'd actually swapped the PS/2 without a wheel for a USB one with a wheel.

I do that all the time on the lab PCs running Windows at work and never have any trouble with it...

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[madcow_ucsb]

Hey, I agree Linux is better in most respects. But the things like this are the issues that the "real people" who want to switch get really turned off about and they're the "features" they'll bitch about when one of their friends is thinking about switching.

My friends know enough about computers to not run email attachments. They don't know enough about them to add a ZAxisMap to an arcane config file.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[N1KO]

The kernel detects my devices fine without having to configure any files. I can set up my network connection automatically with dhcp. MPlayer is able to figure out which codecs to load when i open a file. Why shouldn't X be able to tell how many buttons my mouse has?

Now, I have no problem with config files and i can see how a wheel works like two buttons but why would i have a z axis if my screen is 2d?

"Ah yes, ZAxisMapping 4 5, i'm sure that's the proper way to enable a mouse wheel."

If anything, there should be a Wheel option that is equivalent to the zaxis one, unless there are mice that don't use buttons 4 and 5 for the wheel.

Re:I didn't see it in the changelog...

[dbIII]

Or, better yet, have it *see* what kind of mouse you have and whether it has a wheel or not and get rid of the silly section altogether.

All kinds of weird devices used by graphic designers are seen as mice, and you can get conventional mice with side buttons or little 4 way joysicks. Being able to define a lot of buttons in a text file for your new mouse in a very flexible thing about XFree86. Anyone that doesn't need that functionality can just use the mouse configuration GUI that comes with your distribution - that can write to the text file.

I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.

The big point is you CAN fix the problem that your GUI or automatic mouse configuration program can't, you don't have to wait for the a new mouse driver version or do some weird registry hack.

I like having all kinds of weird options in a plain text configuration file for X - I've certainly got video modes that windows cannot use going on dual boot machines that way.

"Hey - at least I didn't have to blank with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"...

You probably don't have to do it in Mandrake either, there's probably some GUI mouse configuration program you can run with a dozen clicks and mouse movements - just like in MS windows - but it's easier for those who know where the file is and what is in it to change that instead of hunting through menus. MS windows in comparison is very simple to install and maintain for those who can think in registry trees instead of flat files in /etc - or for those who think a periodic re-install of operating system and software is a valid way to maintain a system.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[Anonymous Coward]

You already can.

new kernel,new gnome, new gimp,new X

[Anonymous Coward]

notworthy?

upgrade time!

way worthy !!!!

what distro?

Re:new kernel,new gnome, new gimp,new X

[juhaz]

Fedora Core 2 (estimated to ship in about month) will probably be the first distro to feature all those in stable binary release.

Gentoo might have them earlier if you're into whole "compiling" thing, no idea about Debian unstable, someone more knowledgeable have any idea?

If you are willing to wait bit longer, *shrug*, I guess they're all getting pretty good.

Re:more examples of Linux fragmentation

[ulysses38]

this is what we who have senses of humor call "wit."

Step forward

[stratjakt]

And two steps back.

X11R6. I used that a decade ago.

Time gets spent squabbling about liscensing clauses and other political horseshit. Now we have how many code forks of it? How splintered, exactly, is the dev community around X11?

Linux on the desktop, that white elephant, will roam around in obscurity for another decade or so.

Re:Step forward

[Lolaine]

Windows users have been using (different versions of) the GDI since 90's ... and I think windows is on the desktop momentum :D

Re:Step forward

[black mariah]

Flamebait? He speaks the truth. X development is COMPLETELY FUCKING STAGNANT and it's all because of the petty squablling over bullshit issues. "Brad said I wasn't a good hacker, I'm gonna fork." "I don't like BSD style licenses, I'm gonna fork." "I don't like the main developers, I'm gonna fork."

And there's nobody there so say "Fuck it, someone has to get this shit moving along. Fuck the forks, let's just work on this thing."

Re:Step forward

[squiggleslash]

Get coding then!

Seriously, it's open code, even the XFree86 version - that version has real, practical, problems with the license which means it cannot be adopted by the big distributions, but that doesn't stop you from making the modifications.

If you want to experiment with something, or propose something concrete, all you need is a C compiler and some time. You don't even have to convince everyone to go along with you: if they don't like your ideas, and you think others would find them useful, release what you've done as a fork or a set of independent patches. Sourceforge and Savannah will both be happy to host your project.

Those who moan that others are stalling because of politics are part of the problem. Less moaning, more coding.

Re:Step forward

[black mariah]

That would be nice, but I'm one of the legendary Linux end-users. I'm not a coder. I have to sit idly by and watch a bunch of nerds act like babies everytime someone says something out of place while the software they're supposedly working on stagnates. Hopefully one of the forks will do well and will get X development out of the hellhole it's been in.

Re:Step forward

[10Ghz]

X11R6. I used that a decade ago.

We have been using TCP/IP for something like 20-30 years now. OMG, TCP/IP-developement is stagnant! We must work faster!

Now we have how many code forks of it?

Of what? X? To my knowledge: zero. X is a protocol, nothing more. If you are talking about Xfree, the answer would be: two. Xouvert and Xorg.

Re:Step forward

[KatTran]

There seems to be some confusion about what the code is in X11R6.7. Everyone seems to think it is just a fork of XFree86 brought about because of licence changes, or "squabbles" over development direction. This is simply not the case.

The X Consortium has been producing the "offical" X11 codebase now for quite some time, distributing it under the orginial MIT licence. There are continual updates, which get a minor number, e.g. X11R6.3, X11R6.6, X11R6.7.

However, traditionally the codebase for X.org while being "open source" has been "closed development" and only members of the X Consortium contributed code updates. This wasn't that big of a deal since the members, Sun, IBM, SGI, Compaq/HP/DEC, Hummingbird, were the only people actually using the X11 codebase in their products.

Recently, since Januaray, the X11 Consortium has switched to an "open development" model similar to Linux, Apache, etc. where anyone can contribute patches to the code base.

Also at this time they "standardized" with the rest of the X world (XFree86, freedesktop.org) on libraries, though they still continue seperate code bases for the actual X server and X clients.

X11R6.7 is NOT just a fork of XFree86, is the next iteration of a long and stable (and in my opinion a pretty damn good) X11R6 implementation. It does incorporate freatures/code from the XFree86 code base, but it is not a fork.

These are the facts they way I see them. It is quite possible I'm wrong.

Re:Step forward

[Anonymous Coward]

And there's nobody there so say "Fuck it, someone has to get this shit moving along. Fuck the forks, let's just work on this thing."

Blatant ignorance of the situation. Many developers stopped supporting XFree86 because the main developers wouldn't give them CVS access, even after years sending patches that would get delays of several months.

This fork was much more necessary than many outsiders think.

Re:Step forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, a "gimme, gimme, gimme" person...

Or perhaps one of the seagulls from "Finding Nemo"?

"Mine? Mine? Mine?"

As dear ol' Mum used to say beggars can't be choosers

Re:Step forward

[black mariah]

Yes, I'm sorry that I'm not a coder. Pardon me for deciding to dedicate my life to something I like more. Excuse the fuck out of me for assuming that using free software was one of the many ways to help contribute back to its community.

No, I'm not a coder. I write documentation, do some UI design, contribute graphics, and submit bug reports. I'm fucking sick of assholes assuming I don't do a godddamn thing because I can't code. Fuck you and the idiots that think like you.

Re:Step forward

[po8]

Profanity aside (and that's hard here), you are completely full of it. Yeah, in the last few years, the only X development that's been done is

• Completely revised font support, with arguably higher quality rendering than either Mac or Windows. This gives X apps for the first time the ability to sensibly use the fonts over the network.
• A completely new rendering model, with alpha compositing and alpha transparency, that provides arguably higher-quality rendering than Mac or Windows. This gives X apps for the first time the ability to sensibly draw through X, rather than on their own.
• A completely new window compositing model, giving applications the ability to peform window system effects Mac and Windows can only dream of. The power of this one is only now becoming apparent.
• A new server back-end that is small and efficient enough to run comfortably on ancient laptops, almost completely self configuring, and supports the above-mentioned features.
• A ton of library, toolkit, and utility work: too much to detail here.

Note that all of this is in spite of the fact that the politics were a significant hindrance to those getting the development work done. Those folks would much rather have avoided the political squabbling: the most powerful thing about the new X.org/freedesktop.org structure is that now they can. Expect to see even more coolness in the future.

Yes, I know. IHBT.

Re:Step forward

[Telex4]

With that many "fuck"s in your post, you must be right!

Re:Step forward

[steveha]

We have been using TCP/IP for something like 20-30 years now. OMG, TCP/IP-developement is stagnant! We must work faster!

Heh. And cars still run on wheels! Car design is stagnant!

If you are talking about Xfree, the answer would be: two. Xouvert and Xorg.

Oh, more than that. There is also the freedesktop.org project, the one where Keith Packard is doing really cool things with a composition manager. And there may be others.

steveha

Re:Step forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you don't like the way things are going, just fork it and ...Oh wait, nevermind.

Re:Step forward

[BlueLightning]

Nobody's going to deny there were serious problems with the pace of development with XFree86. But when someone makes it truly difficult to work with them, then you just can't get any work done.

I believe the release of XOrg speaks for itself - the coding has resumed, the development process is more open, and things are humming along pretty smoothly. There's a stable branch (Xorg) and a development branch (fd.o). What more do you want?

Re:Step forward

[10Ghz]

Oh, more than that. There is also the freedesktop.org project, the one where Keith Packard is doing really cool things with a composition manager. And there may be others.

Xserver (the project you are referring to) is not really a fork of Xfree. Xserver is based on Kdrive.

Re:Step forward

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had paid attention you would have noticed that TCP/IP development is not stagnant. Both windows and Unix/Linix have made many hundreds of changes to TCP/IP in the past 5 years. Including multicasting, asymetrical routing, IP V6, new protocol stacks.

Also you overlooked that if you get it right first time you only need small changes, as apposed to X that was a rats arse from day one......

Re:But...

[mark_lybarger]

no. XFree86 is now dying. They've started their own obituary with the abrupt and incompatible licenses changes. Xorg lives on.

David Dawes?

[Featureless]

Would someone in the know please, for the benefit of the crowd, enlighten us as to whether this entire exercise was, as much as anything else, to rid the mainstream "free software X" development of David Dawes?

From reading the coverage on slashdot so far and following the source material (including specific comments by major players that name his name), that's kind of the sense I get.

Of course, the process created more openness - you can say the openness is the primary reason, but again, from following the list archives, I got the sense he was a big part of why it wasn't so open in the first place...

Re:David Dawes?

[bfree]

I have also read extensively about this problem for quite a while (the problems with XFree86 have been around quite a while, look back at Cygwin's problems and the similar problems that afflicted ati, basically patches were rotting). Whether or not David Dawes was a part of why it wasn't so open is hard to say, you have to remember he is the voice of the XFree86 board, and as such he speaks for them, not himself. XFree86 was the de facto default and remained in that position for a long time even while it was clear that it's development model no longer fitted in with everything else. The fact that they weren't dropped until they then decided to change some licenses to give themselves more credit is a sign of the reluctance to fork, but I presonally believe (and said from the outset) a fork was the right thing here unless XFree86 backed down, the key is just making sure you have enough bodies along with you (I'd have liked to see Branden from Debian on the interim board, this is a time when licenses are important and there's a man who knows them and X very well, I'd have liked to see more non-commercial people full stop actually). The question now is when and if the two trees will be incompatible vis-a-vis binary drivers, and then which versions Nvidia and Ati will support?

Re:David Dawes?

[fooishbar]

Branden has heaps of commitments as is, and was thus unable to join the board. He would've been a good choice, tho.

But licenses are not an issue: X.Org has its own retained legal counsel, and many board members have access to brilliant professional lawyers in their own organisations, each with their own specialisations, who can help out (and have helped out enormously).

Re:David Dawes?

[RedWizzard]

Whether or not David Dawes was a part of why it wasn't so open is hard to say, you have to remember he is the voice of the XFree86 board, and as such he speaks for them, not himself.

He speaks for the board in a particularly abrasive, arrogant, and uncompromising voice. That has been a cause of a number of problems IMHO, and it comes from him, not the board.

Re:David Dawes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's what it looked like to me too.

If that's the case, then the fork is a good thing. Another asshole gets to lord over their private garden and the rest of us can move on.

Re:more examples of Linux fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the fact that this troll's copy/paste post was dated before the release of Windows XP.

Slashdot's trolls arn't creative anymore, we need some new ones.

freedesktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

so where does the freedesktop.org xserver fit in with Xorg? i noticed that Xorg has a page on freedesktop.org

Re:freedesktop?

[diegocgteleline.es]

The X.org CVS tree is hosted in the freedesktop.org server. So I'd expect lots of colaborations..

Re:freedesktop?

[fault0]

Many improvements made in xserver will probably filter through xorg eventually. xserver is much more experimental than xorg is... but most future development will happen in xorg, not xserver.

Both are hosted by freedesktop, including cvs and bugzilla.

Re:freedesktop?

[The Original Yama]

I was wondering the same thing. Xorg is based on XFree86, but the FreeDesktop.org version is based on Kdrive (which is quite different architecturally). Will these two projects co-operate or will one die?

Re:freedesktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will these two projects co-operate or will one die?

One is the X.Org monolithic tree. One is the KDrive modular tree.

Keith Packard is behind both projects. He has pushed the monolithic tree on the grounds that the modular tree is not yet ready for wide-scale usage.

Knowing Keith, you should expect him to be very serious about maintaining the monolithic tree as long as the modular tree is in a beta state. However, once the monolithic tree gets into Debian and is widely used, you might conceivably expect Keith to lobby for dropping the monolithic tree.

What will happen then is anyones guess.

Con job?

[Queuetue]

I'm not saying *I* feel this way, but I was wondering what people think about David Dawes' statement to the effect that the big Linux Vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, because the collection of vendors can push it in directions that make the companies happier. He hints that they used the license issue as an excuse to wag the dog, and we users have been duped.

Re:Con job?

[Queuetue]

Here's the actual quote from The Inquirer:

"But David Dawes seems a little suspicious: "I have heard privately that some vendors were planning to move to an X.Org release even before this licence issue came up. That probably makes business sense for the vendors given that X.Org is a vendor-oriented organization sponsored by hardware and software companies, while XFree86 is an independent group of volunteer developers. I suspect that the licence issue may have affected the timing, but not the end result", he concluded. "

Re:Con job?

[BJH]

Yeah, that's obviously the reason why Debian was so quick to jump to X.org - cause they want to make their corporate masters happy.

</sarcasm>

Re:Con job?

[kubrick]

Didn't Dawes change the XFree86 licence to something pretty similar to what he used for his own company's work on the codebase, though, and isn't this what caused the fork in the first place? Something about a pot and a kettle?

Re:Con job?

[fault0]

No.. the fork existed before the license change.. but certainly picked up MUCH more momentum after it.

Re:Con job?

[KeyserDK]

Probably, but I still believe it is a good change anyway. People are to harsh on david though, they have forgotten how big an improvement XFree86 4.x actually was.

His current vision just didn't fit with X.org developers needs. So they forked, big deal..

Re:Con job?

[bfree]

I don't think anyone has been duped at all. I do think that people have been considering for quite a while how to escape XFree86. It's development structure had become a farce, cygwin had stopped submitting patches because it was too much work trying to figure out when and if they were ever applied, ati it seems were annoyed that their patches spent months sitting in XFree86 with no reply, and then out came a new major update with no sign of them! Because even XFree86 could see this coming, they made a few changes but they didn't address the issues. Finally they decided they wanted more credit and everyone shouted back that this was too much, they continued and now there's a fork.

Having said all that, I will be very interested to see what complaints will arrise about X.org over the next few months, if they really are a commercial orientated body making decisions for the companies then perhaps another fork won't be too far away! Having a FSF member of the interim board suggests though that the people coming in here have learnt from mistakes of the past and simply want to provide some financial backing to make sure this new co-operative gets of and running smoothly.

Re:Con job?

[J. J. Ramsey]

"I was wondering what people think about David Dawes' statement to the effect that the big Linux Vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, because the collection of vendors can push it in directions that make the companies happier."

Dawes' info is outdated. X.org is not the vendor-only consortium that it used to be.

Re:Con job?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you explain what the term "wag the dog" means?

Re:Con job?

[Queuetue]

Technically, it's when the subsidiary part controls the major part - literally, if instead of the dog wagging his tail, the reverse were true.

In this case, there are a lot of users and developers, and we should be in solid control of where X heads - if we were fooled into a course of action, it would represent the minority (the vendors) controlling the majority (the users and customers).

See the great movie of the same title, although the term is much older.

Re:Con job?

[FauxPasIII]

> Yeah, that's obviously the reason why Debian was so quick to jump to X.org

Debian hasn't moved to X.org so far as I'm aware. They've just decided to avoid XFree 4.4.

Re:Con job?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't read the article, did ya?

As one of the largest GNU/Linux distribution projects in the world, the Debian Project is delighted to see that freedom and diversity are alive and well in the X technology sector. We're also delighted that the X.Org Foundation is dedicated to retaining the licensing model that has made the X Window System an enduring success, said Branden Robinson of the Debian GNU/Linux Project. Like us, the X.Org Foundation is a member-driven organization devoted to Free Software. We cannot help but be enthusiastic about them and the work they're doing for the X Window System and Free Software communities alike.

Re:Con job?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the newsgroup: linux.debian.maint.x

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 06:51:03PM +0300, Dan Korostelev wrote:
> Is there any plans to replace XFree86 with XOrg
> (http://freedesktop.org/Software/xorg), which is actually a fork of
> XFree 4.4 with free licence.
>
> Sorry for my english. Bye.

No, but there are plans to replace it with freedesktop.org's modular
xlibs/xserver/xapps trees, to make it far easier to maintain.

Re:Con job?

[FrozedSolid]

What's the signifance of a vendor-controlled fork? Is this bad?

Wasn't part of the problem with X, the fact that they refused to accept a lot of patches? I always thought that part of the reason why X never got a lot of vendor support was, among other things, lack of patch acceptance. Is this true? Should we be worried about the vendors?

Re:Con job?

[N1KO]

These vendors have also worked on the linux kernel and gcc. Those projects seem to be doing fine, much better than xfree86 at least.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[Anonymous Coward]

Scandinavian (overlords) have no problems with their extra letters (transliterated) AE, OE, AA.
Welcome your new overlords now or be ineligible for installation of AE Windows System.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[BenjyD]

+2 True geek humour,
+5 if you didn't need to use an ASCII chart

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[Trurl's Machine]

Not that easy. A is already taken by a popular TV series.. The same series actually consumed the letter T. B is unusable, as it used to be associated with a failed operating system. C is, obviously, a popular programming language. Now, we could settle for D, but I think it could be confusing for chemists, who use it to describe chiral isomers. E would be a bad idea, as e- is one of the most hated prefixes of the present day. F obviously if out of question, as it stands for a chemical element, and G would create too many lame slashdot jokes related to clitoris. I could actually go this way through the whole ASCII table, but I'm too lazy for it.

Who had the vision?

[shachart]

To back-order x.org a few years back?

Re:Who had the vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the same one who bought a.org, b.org, c.org, d.org..... it doesnt take great vision to register a 1 letter domain name, especially x

Re:Who had the vision?

[james b]

Well, back in '98 or so when I first visited x.org, it was the website of the `x consortium', which seemed to be a steering group with the various companies that ship an X server implementation as members, and Xfree86 as an `honorary member'. It seems like x.org is the same group, or at least related.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[black mariah]

I guess they could always use X++.

Re:Politics!

[Queuetue]

The popular opinion is that this move *sheds* political weight and opens the X development process up.

Re:Politics!

[fault0]

>If we can create a modern standardized windowing protocol (which is what X11 essentially is, only broken and outdated)

Uhm... what is broken and outdated about X11?

The question is

[Chuck Chunder]

Will those distros continue to go with XFree86 now that the X.Org Foundation is not just talking about it but is also actually delivering a forward moving, credible alternative?

Re:The question is

[Rex Code]

Will those distros continue to go with XFree86 now that the X.Org Foundation is not just talking about it but is also actually delivering a forward moving, credible alternative?

And what is this alternative? A rebranded XFree86 4.3.0.1 with the various updates that could be easily found online? You know, when XFree86 began working on the X codebase it wouldn't even run on an x86 PC - they've done some remarkable work. X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit, applied some debatable updates to the code (using an unstable freetype2 is probably not wise), and now they've put it back up for download.

Yessir, hand 'em the crown...

Re:The question is

[Anonymous Coward]

But Xorg has all the good people working on it, i.e. Keith Packard, Havoc Pennington, Robert Love and many more. Keith Packard alone has architected most notable XFree86 changes in the last few years, for example XFT and Freetype integration in the first place. Xorg and Freedesktop.org have a lot of positive mindshare and XFree86 is being dropped like a hot potato by all the distros. This has been a long time coming, the license change is just the last drop. I for one think this is great and will help us to drag X into the 21st century. To me, it seems obvious that Xorg/Freedesktop has already won.

Re:The question is

[J. J. Ramsey]

Will those distros continue to go with XFree86 now that the X.Org Foundation is not just talking about it but is also actually delivering a forward moving, credible alternative?

And what is this alternative? A rebranded XFree86 4.3.0.1 with the various updates that could be easily found online?

Nope. The alternative is a cleaned-up fork of XFree86 4.4RC2, binary-compatible with XFree86 4.4.0.

X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit

It's not the giving of credit that's the issue; it's the matter of GPL compatibility. Cute strawman.

applied some debatable updates to the code (using an unstable freetype2 is probably not wise)

Freetype 2.1.7 is the latest stable release of Freetype2. Not everyone uses the Linux version number scheme where an odd-numbered minor version number indicates a development version rather than a stable version.

Re:The question is

[Anonymous Coward]

"release is now available for twenty (yep that's the number $platform_counter!)"

This is inside a 20 to zero loop?

Re:The question is

[Anonymous Coward]

X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit

It's not the giving of credit that's the issue; it's the matter of GPL compatibility. Cute strawman.

The XFree86 client libs are not affected by the license change, so if there's a GPL compatibility problem with XFree86 right now, what is it? Let's have it.

I think you're the one with the strawman argument, since I never said anything about the GPL (you're wrong about that anyway).

Re:The question is

[J. J. Ramsey]

"The XFree86 client libs are not affected by the license change, so if there's a GPL compatibility problem with XFree86 right now, what is it? Let's have it."

If you don't care about upgrade paths, I suppose there is no problem, since the problem with using XFree86 4.4.0 right now is that the upgrade path is legally uncertain. David Dawes has been non-committal about whether the XFree client libs will be under the new GPL-incompatible license in the future. Given that the XFree client libs are under the old license at all is a grudging concession on his part, there is at least a medium-size risk that he will outright make the whole of XFree86 GPL-incompatible, so that a Linux distributor can no longer distribute GPL'd apps linked to the client libs of a future version of XFree86, say, version 4.4.2.

Re:The question is

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is dismissing the good work done by XFree86 project.

The fact that they have done lot of good work in the past does not, however mean that we should blindly go with the bastard running the show now.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[Trolling4Dollars]

Why ask Y? ;P

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[jcn]

I personally look forward to being able to run [ on my laptop...

Yeah, great. And watch stanzas like:

# If running interactively, then:
if [ "$PS1" ]; then
...
fi

bring up the X server.

what was so special to XFree about [19]86

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they could update with the years and not use Y99 dates.

Ok it's about x86. but it runs on many other platforms add Intel has moved away from the x86 numbers long ago.

and how can they expect to compete agaist 'x.org'?

Re:what was so special to XFree about [19]86

[gabebear]

I believe the only 2 CPU lines for desktops/servers they have ever put out that don't have an 86 number are the 8088 and the Itanium.

They market the Nocona CPU as x86-64, to emphasize that it's compatable with their older chips.

• Pentium = 586(IA32)
• Pentium I/II/III/4 = 686(IA32)
• Itanium I/II = IA64 (not x86)
• Nocona = x86-64(AMD64)

Re:what was so special to XFree about [19]86

[TCaM]

Also the 80188 was an available variant of the 80186, which was used in a few (very few) desktop machines.

Re:what was so special to XFree about [19]86

[Anonymous Coward]

The Intel desktop and server chips

(RISC family & related)
* 4004
* 8008
* 8800
* iAXP-432
* 80860 / i860
* 80960 / i960

(CISC, x86 family)
* 8008 / 8080 / 8085 (= "086") ((IA08))
(note the Z800, Z8000; 16 & 32 bit extensions)
* 8086 / 8088 / 80186 / 80188 (= "186") (IA16)
* 80286 / i286APX (= 286) (IA16)
* 386dx / 386sx (= 386) (IA32)
* 486dx / 486sx (486slc) [P4] (= 486) (IA32)
* Pentium / Pentium MMX [P5] (= 586) (IA32)
* Pentium Pro/II/III/M [P6] (= 686) (IA32)
* Pentium 4/"Prescott" "P7" (= 786) (IA32)
* "Pentium 6"/'i-x86-64'/"P8" (= "886") (AMD64)
(note the Opteron, Ahtlon64 are x86-64/AMD64)
(forthcoming AMD64 killer, AMD64 compatible)

* Itanium I/II (EPIC) (= PA-RISCx)(IA64)
(VLIW 64bit)

* Xscale
- ARM and StrongARM processors which if your PDA were your main machine... not have 86 in them.

Re:what was so special to XFree about [19]86

[istewart]

and how can they expect to compete agaist 'x.org'?

I expect there will be people saying exactly the same thing about X.org when it is commonplace but the DNS standards have moved on from TLDs such as .org.

Re:Politics!

[be-fan]

I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails...
And it really shows in your post!

But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting.
Right. Because RedHat and Debian are *such* reactionary GPL-fundamentalists organization.

(yeah, there are forks, but they haven't been around long enough to prove their stability or their worth).
You do realize that X.org is the maintainer of the reference X11R6.x codebase, and that X11R6.7 is a continuation of XFree86 4.4-RC2, which is a derivative of that reference codebase?

If we can create a modern standardized windowing protocol (which is what X11 essentially is, only broken and outdated),
What is broken and outdated about the X11 protocol? Taking into account widely-supported extensions like RENDER, the X11 protocol is surprisingly Good. There are warts, to be sure (the color model, for example), but every long-lived system has those.

we can maxamize portability between platforms
Eh? X11 is the most portable windowing system in existance!

and radically simplify software development.
So X12 will be written in Lisp :) I'd go jump on that bandwagon!

Even Microsoft would jump on the bandwagon.
Have you lost *complete* touch with reality???

and seek to accomplish far too much and form their own proprietary standards.
What proprietory standards???? Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about?

We need a completely new protocol so that everyone can work together and maintain compatibility.
We need to ditch a widely-supported, well-tested, mature, easily-extensible, and highly compatible protocol, and create a new, untested, immature, and unsupported one, in order to maintain compatibility?

Re:Politics!

[molarmass192]

It must include representatives from both open and semi-open companies - Red Hat, the KDE and Gnome teams, present X developers, Apple, IBM, Sun, and possibly even Microsoft.

Comments on suggested representatives:

RedHat - Good choice.

KDE - Why? They only deal with QT, not X. Trolltech might be a good choice.

Gnome - Why? They only deal with GTK, not X. Maybe you mean the GTK devs.

Present X devs - The core XF86 team is the reason this mess started in the first place. They shouldn't be brought in to f--- any new standard up.

Apple - Why? Apple uses Quartz, they could care less about X and might even have an incentive to see it fail.

IBM - Good choice.

Sun - Good choice -but- I am starting to have trouble trusting Sun, it's still a stretch but I'm seeing the beginnings of the next SCO in them.

Microsoft - Never. They only have a vested interest in seeing X fail. Look at all the good work they did with OpenGL as an example.

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails... But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting.

Uninformed opinions, just what we need.

Re:But...

[Espectr0]

Where's the BSD is dying troll post, renamed to match the X situation, when you need it?

Re:Politics!

[Rich]

Regarding KDE, we actually do interact directly with X11 as well as with X directly in a number of places. These include the window manager, startup notification, the system tray, window reparenting for Java support, the list goes on. Basically Qt provides support for things that can be done in a platform indepedent way, and we provide the rest in kdelibs.

Re:Politics!

[TobascoKid]

It seems that politics are killing X11
...
Of course, I firmly believe that X needs to be replaced. Just not for political reasons. Whomever's in charge of X needs to form a panel of industry experts and draft an X12 protocol. In my mind, the panel should include network engineers, usability experts, etc. It must include representatives from both open and semi-open companies - Red Hat, the KDE and Gnome teams, present X developers, Apple, IBM, Sun, and possibly even Microsoft.

So, you're saying that politics are killing X11, and the above mentioned entities should all get in a room to create X12? What do you think the politics are going to be like? Can you really seee Apple, IBM, Sun and Microsoft (MS - wtf would they want with X12) all getting together for the common good?

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you're an idiot.

Apple, IBM, Sun, Microsoft would all love to make the spec so complex and braindead that it would bury X for good.

What wonderful protocol was ever designed by them?
I just loved Windows' network file system.

Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Gleef]

It's not that pine is not GPL, it's that pine is altogether Not Free Software. Specifically, the University of Washington will not allow anyone to distribute modified versions, they've even threatened to sue people who do this with older versions of Pine. This makes it hard to work the software into a distribution like Red Hat, and even harder to want to.

Personally, I use Mutt, and I love it. Other people seem equally pleased with elm. With both of these clients, "all you need is an xterm".

If you really prefer Pine, there are two projects to create an Free replacement for it: Hydrant and OSERP. I don't know how far along and usable either project is. If you just miss Pico, there's an excellent Free clone called Nano, which is very usable and included in most Linux distros already.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Noksagt]

Pine has a superior IMAP implementation than any of these alternatives. The source is available for free. You can release patches to Pine. It is also easy to write scripts for it. Red Hat had done this at one time.

What modifications are needed to it in the first place? The stock-binary is well-maintained. And it is easy enough to apply a patch to the source code & recompile.

OSERP is under active development, but is still very alpha. I thought Hydrant had died, but some of the CVS files have been updated within the past year.

Why take RMS's opinion on free/nonfree as scripture? It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.

I don't have a problem with Debian's commitment to libre software & their choice not to ship pine. But other distros don't seem to have a consistent stance on how free apps have to be before they're included.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

And, don't forget, the Debian package hierarchy does have a non-free branch, so even if Debian, like the others, chooses not to include it in the main distro, it's as easy to install as anything else.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[mbanck]

However, Debian does not ship pine even in non-free, due to the license.

Michael

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[thumperward]

It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.

Is it also funny being sued for releasing patched versions?

- Chris

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[rsidd]

Pine has a superior IMAP implementation than any of these alternatives.

I was using imap with mutt back in 1999. I haven't needed to use imap since 2000, but I don't imagine the support has gone away.

What modifications are needed to it in the first place? The stock-binary is well-maintained. And it is easy enough to apply a patch to the source code & recompile.

So apply the patch and compile it. But Red Hat won't do it for you because they can't distribute a binary based on modified source.

Why take RMS's opinion on free/nonfree as scripture? It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.

Not "more than", but "as much as". If Red Hat can't patch pine even to fix bugs, why should they distribute it? If you need it you can always compile it yourself.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[rnd()]

Nano has great syntax highlighting, so it's great for writing code.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[MrBlue VT]

Ugh, writing code with Nano? Jeez, you might as well have suggested writing code with notepad.exe. Get a real editor like Vim!

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[MrBlue VT]

You can get Pine pretty easily from this site. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://src.braincells.com/debian woody/
deb-src http://src.braincells.com/debian woody/

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[ron_ivi]

But Debian does ship a tracker that lets you fetch/patch/and/build pine from source.

See pine-tracker : "

apt-get install pine-tracker
...
# apt-get --only-source build-dep pine
# apt-get --only-source -b source pine

Then use dpkg -i to install the generated debian packages.

"

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Pine has a superior IMAP implementation than any of these alternatives.

> I was using imap with mutt back in 1999. I haven't needed to use imap since 2000, but I don't imagine the support has gone away.

Parents claim was that the Pine implementation is superior, not that support in the alternatives does not exist. For example, I found that Mutt took much longer to display large inboxes through IMAP than Pine.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Noksagt]

I was using imap with mutt back in 1999.

I've used mutt's IMAP. It does exist. It just isn't as good as pine's. IMAP is great and it is unfortunate that the two best IMAP clients are pine (which isn't libre) and mulberry (which isn't even gratis). Evolution has pretty good IMAP, but is overkill for me & there aren't currently any text-based clients (which I prefer) that approach the support I desire.

So apply the patch and compile it. But Red Hat won't do it for you because they can't distribute a binary based on modified source.

Again, the stock binary pine would be good enough to be included in the distro. But, why can't they provide an SRPM which has the pine source & the diffs that they may want to add & install from source?

If Red Hat can't patch pine even to fix bugs, why should they distribute it? If you need it you can always compile it yourself.

I'm not saying they have to include it. I said I was fine with Debian not including it, for example. Red Hat and other distros ship non-free software. Java SDK, xv, OpenMotif, opera, macromedia flash, acrobat reader, etc. aren't libre. Many distros include some or all of these. I think it is silly to decide not to ship XFree or pine or other non-libre software because of licensing issues if you ship other packages that are at least as bad.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Just Some Guy]

What modifications are needed to it in the first place?

That's the argument I hear from DJB fans, too. The modifications can be as simple as telling it to look for config files in the place that a particular OS keeps them, rather than where the application thinks they should go. Now, IANAPineExpert, but imagine that it wants link against something in /usr/lib, but on a particular OS, that library is in /usr/local/lib. Patching the system to look in the latter directory may be enough to violate the terms of distribution, making it illegal for the vendor to supply a binary copy.

Sure, they can provide a "tracker" to download, patch, and compile the source. However, that implies having a working compiler and the development package for every dependency, which makes it troublesome for anyone who wants to provide the program on a shared machine where they don't want the users to have access to a compiler (and yes, there are systems like that).

That's why this is more than just pettiness. The terms of the license may be difficult or impossible to follow by a vendor, even if they're acceptable to the end users. In this case, that's why Mutt is wildly popular but few people ever mention using Pine anymore.

And no, I don't use Mutt. Gnus makes them all obsolete. ;-)

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Gleef]

Nosagt wrote:
Pine has a superior IMAP implementation than any of these alternatives.

I use IMAP on Mutt daily, I used to use IMAP on Pine daily. I'm not just talking about a single folder in IMAP either, I'm talking about two seperate accounts each with over 20 folders in a hierarchy that goes up to four or five folders deep. Mutt handles it fine.

While Pine had IMAP before Mutt did, Mutt has long since caught up, and I can't think of a single way which Pine's IMAP implementation is superior to Mutt's. I would be interested to hear if you have an example?

What modifications are needed to it in the first place? The stock-binary is well-maintained. And it is easy enough to apply a patch to the source code & recompile.

Security and bug fixes without being forced to wait for upstream to get around to it is always first on the list. Next on the list is "What if University of Washington decides to stop maintaining it". Many distributions also want to make sure the sofware integrates well with other software in their distro, this would possibly require changes. These issues are all solved with Free software, but difficult to impossible to do in a binary distribution like Red Hat with Pine's licensing.

Why take RMS's opinion on free/nonfree as scripture?

Who said anything about taking RMS's opinion as scripture?? I never said it shouldn't be used because RMS said it was bad, I said it shouldn't be distributed because distros need to be able to ship modified binaries. Gentoo's users might be happy recompiling everything, but most of Red Hat's users aren't.

I agree with RMS because I have given the topic a lot of thought and find he's right, not because RMS has a special place in the community, nor because of any alleged "scripture".

It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.

As far as I know, the only serious extra bashing UofW got for Pine/Pico is when they started claiming that the Permission Notice and Disclaimer license that they used to ship under means something different than every other developer who used it says it does. However, for purposes of Pine and Pico, most distributors now treat their license according to UofW's interpretation, and don't distribute modified binaries, usually by not distributing Pine or Pico at all.

I don't have a problem with Debian's commitment to libre software & their choice not to ship pine. But other distros don't seem to have a consistent stance on how free apps have to be before they're included.

Some other distributions were slower than Debian in realizing that there was a problem. Some were lazy and figured UofW wouldn't call them on it. Some were happy shipping the unmodified binaries. Feel free to mock and call out distributors if their attitude on Pine/Pico is inconsistent. Personally, I run Debian.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Noksagt]

The modifications can be as simple as telling it to look for config files

This particular example doesn't need a patch

makes it troublesome for anyone who wants to provide the program on a shared machine where they don't want the users to have access to a compiler

I grant this could be a pain in the butt if you wanted a binary-only distro. I would think that so many other things would make not having a compiler such a pain in the butt, that the ideal solution would be to use access rights to restrict the compiler to be used by root only.

As mentioned in another post: I do wish that pine was more free. Or that mutt or gnus suited my needs. I am also fine with distros who don't ship pine or xfree because they simply don't want to. But it seems silly to harp on the license when you ship other software that isn't libre.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Noksagt]

Mutt has long since caught up, and I can't think of a single way which Pine's IMAP implementation is superior to Mutt's. I would be interested to hear if you have an example?

I will sheepishly admit I haven't tried the latest release of mutt. I do try it from time-to-time, as it seems as EVERYONE else is using it & I don't want to be caught with un under-developed mail-app. Please correct any mistakes on my part. If all of my mistakes are corrected, I'll drop pine right now!

1. Slower indexing of IMAP folders
2. Can't search across multiple mailboxes (and the IMAP searches are slow & weren't implemented all that well)
3. Can't store mutt configuration in an IMAP directory
4. No support for user-defined labels & modifying flags (such as "deleted") is a bit cumbersome.

I grant that it would be nice if pine was truly "free." But Red hat hasn't had any qualms about shipping non-free software.

I never said it shouldn't be used because RMS said it was bad, I said it shouldn't be distributed because distros need to be able to ship modified binaries.

Apologies for a slightly extremist remark on my part. I meant nothing against you & only a little against the maintainers of the distros. I find it suspect that many of the distros who DO ship non-free software suddenly stop shipping something when the FSF starts raising hell about the license.

Gentoo's users might be happy recompiling everything

And now I must acknowlege my bias :)

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[rnd()]

What does vim offer that Nano doesn't?

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Kent Recal]

Magic.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[scm]

"I don't have a problem with Debian's commitment to libre software & their choice not to ship pine."

Pine is included in Debian, in the non free section. I believe the installer downloads the source from UW, patchs it, and builds it.

The grandparent post was talking about pine not being included in *Red Hat* not Debian.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[JanneM]

Red Hat and other distros ship non-free software. Java SDK, xv, OpenMotif, opera, macromedia flash, acrobat reader, etc. aren't libre.

Actually, Fedora doesn't come with any of that software (and to my knowledge, without any non-free software at all). A point in favour of the distro in my opinion, especially considering that you can easily grab it yourself with apt later on.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Noksagt]

Top parent didn't indicate if he was talking about Fedora (which Red Hat doesn't ship) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which they do). Yes, Fedora embraces libre software. RHEL includes nonfree software. Neither includes pine.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Gleef]

Likewise, I haven't tried recent versions of pine, so:

1. Mutt's LDAP indexing is fast enough for me, but I honestly don't know if it's faster, slower or the same as Pine

2. This is really two things: Yes, to my knowledge mutt can't search across multiple mailboxes (this would be a nifty feature, but I haven't needed it yet). I don't find IMAP searches slow, if you aren't searching the message bodies, it's blazing; if you are searching the message bodies, the bottleneck is the network and the IMAP server, not the client.

3. Refraining from storing configuration settings via IMAP strikes me as a feature, or more properly a bugfix. The one thing that always infuriated me about Pine was its insistance on polluting mail folders with special pine-specific things, making it hard and ugly to use any other mail client on the same emails.

Unless you are saying that Pine has ACAP support, which is news to me. To my knowledge UofW has talked about adding ACAP to Pine, but hasn't done it yet. ACAP doesn't mean much to me anyway without a good Free ACAP server (Cyrus has a server, but they apparently stopped developing it).

4. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "user-defined labels", are these per-message flags, or arbitrary variables? How are they stored on an IMAP server?

Modifying flags (such as deleted) seems straightforward to me, I'm not sure what your gripe is here.

- - - - -

When Red Hat started, they didn't know much about Free software, and they shipped anything they could get their hands on. Then they got a clue and said that the core will be all free, and dumped several non-free packages (but they still allowed non-essential packages to be non-free). Now that they're making their big enterprise push, I don't know what their policy is. Oracle isn't free software, that's for sure.

Since almost all Linux software wants to be in Red Hat, I think they really ought to give the community a clear statement as to what their packaging and licensing standards are.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Noksagt]

1. I was referring to IMAP indexing. If I open a folder with 1000 large emails, pine has been noticeably snappier. Ditty when I sort them.

2. Searching through IMAP is part of the protocol. It used to be that mutt didn't implement this--it would have to download the message to search it. Pine and mulberry and gnus have done this. I don't know if it has changed. If mutt still hasn't implemented this, the bottleneck is very much the client, as it doesn't use the speedier protocol!

3. No. IMAP protocol lets you store anything you please. The folders are compartmentalized & don't effect any other client. I am unaware of polluting mail folders either. It is true that pine can read/write MANY different folder formats, some of which are similar to others, but different enough that some other clients which don't support the specific format would choke. I think all setup is stored in dotfiles. It is nice to be able to pull these from IMAP. IMSP/ACAP are also nice, of course. I do wish pine supported them, but my work's IMAP server doesn't run those anyway. Storing my configuration directly in an IMAP folder is quite nice. Incidentally, ACAP is somewhat dead. IMSP does have several free servers.

4. Just as you can flag a message seen, important, answered, deleted, and draft (which are the fairly standard flags), IMAP lets you setup your own user-defined flags. Mutt didn't do this the last time I checked. IETF draft

----

Fedora has a nice approach to free software. It is similar to debian's. I have no problems with it. Red Hat Enerprise Linux also dropped pine support. But they ship a ton of software that isn't libre & some which isn't even gratis. THIS is what I am griping about. If they were just consistent, it would be much better. As it is, they only seem to drop the non-libre products that the community makes noise about (pine, xfree...). This is silly.

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[juhaz]

But, why can't they provide an SRPM which has the pine source & the diffs that they may want to add & install from source?

Isn't that kind of pointless? There are plenty of people who have pine s/rpms for RedHat and/or Fedora, does it really matter if it's an "official" one?

See, it's on Red Hat's servers! Good enough?

Re:Pine Problems and Alternatives

[Gleef]

Thank you, you have given me a lot to think about regarding Mutt's IMAP implementation. There's no way I'm switching back to Pine (Mutt's Free and good enough for me, and I prefer its configuration flexibility), but I might look into the IMAP Spec and the Pine source and work on coding some IMAP improvements for Mutt to send to the maintainers.

I use Mutt so much during the day, I'd love to feel I put something good into it.

As it is, they only seem to drop the non-libre products that the community makes noise about (pine, xfree...). This is silly.

This isn't silly, it's troubling. The way I interpret Red Hat's reactions to license problems is that it cares about licensing issues, but not enough to have sufficent staff checking the licenses of what they're distributing. This could be a potential disaster, as if any Linux distro gets sued for a license snafu, they'd likely be first.

Also, even with the annoying license changes, XFree86 is still Free software. The noise isn't because they're non-free, it's because other software builds on XFree86, and you can't make a derivative work of something with an incompatible license, even if both are Free. Red Hat's switch here is either because they don't want to have to figure out if any licensing has broken due to the change, and/or because they want more input into X development, and the freedesktop.org model will give them that.

Dunno about wagging the dog

[Chuck Chunder]

I think (as a casual observer) the licence change was more like the 'last straw'. Unhappiness within XFree86 has been percolating for some time.

X12 already exists...

[gosand]

Are you aware that there is already a very well established protocol called X12? I guess they'd have to pick another name for it, if they even did it for some reason.

Re:Politics!

[molarmass192]

CRAP!!! I forgot all about window managers. My bad, need to get another cup of coffee in me before I say any more stupid things today.

Coding X

[Anonymous Coward]

Would half of you complain half as much, if you actualy tried to code something using the X protocol, or atleast half of it? before judging that X is bad, slow and old?

I ask, whats so darn bad about X?
What does sucks so much about its protocol?

Re:Coding X

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm...have you ever written using X yourself?
x11_window.c is the most complicated and time-consuming file to compile in xmame, and X is routinely blamed for bad performance relative to windows port. Why else would so many clamor for DGA?

Design by committee sucks

[linefeed0]

Like some smoke-filled-room committee of vendors' "experts" is going to do things better than an organization that's open and responsive to both vendors and users... right.

I find it interesting that you insist (in boldface) that Apple be such an important player in that kind of process. Apple would have shipped OS X earlier if it had tempered the advice of all the experts they'd brought in with some common sense. (The obvious example is Tevanian's insistence on using Mach, which required a good part of a whole team of kernel engineers over 4 years to fix up, because it was his pet research project at CMU.)

BTW ... I'm a big fan of Sun software and hardware

[molarmass192]

... the SCO comparison is probably uncalled for but I am starting to get concerned with the messages management is sending out.

Re:X12 already exists.(official link)..

[gosand]

D'oh! I took the first google link, but I should have linked to the Official ASC X12 Site . Sorry.

SCO support

[cyrilc]

SCO OpenServer support updates. X11R6.7 now works on Release 5.0.7...

Wouldn't it be possible that X.Org follow nmap's stance on licensing their software ?
That would force them (SCO) to use the regular/former version of XFree86 instead of one that might bring more promises and contributions.

That would be also an interresting trend to follow

Re:SCO support

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you completely. Btw, here's the related nmap release note excerpt you linked, for the "link follow" impaired (emphasis mine) :

SCO Corporation of Lindon, Utah (formerly Caldera) has lately taken to an extortion campaign of demanding license fees from Linux users for code that they themselves knowingly distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. They have also refused to accept the GPL, claiming that some preposterous theory of theirs makes it invalid (and even unconstitutional)! Meanwhile they have distributed GPL-licensed Nmap in (at least) their "Supplemental Open Source CD". In response to these blatant violations, and in accordance with section 4 of the GPL, we hereby terminate SCO's rights to redistribute any versions of Nmap in any of their products, including (without limitation) OpenLinux, Skunkware, OpenServer, and UNIXWare. We have also stopped supporting the OpenServer and UNIXWare platforms.

Re:Politics!

[bfree]

You say the forks haven't been around long enough to prove their stability? How about Debian's for of XFree86? They port it to many architectures and then maintain a stable release for a few years while working on its replacement. I think they are proven.

This fork (X.org) is simply XFree86 4.4RC2 (before the liscense change) and I would suspect they are monitoring XFree86 for updates which aren't tainted by the new license, and they are working on it themselves. It's not a worrying fork at this stage, it's just what would have happened if XFree86 (or another FOSS project) and all it's internal developers were blown up yesterday. These people have all been working with XFree86 from the outside for quite a while and it includes Cygwin's Mr Hunt who had withdrawn cygwin from XFree86 (well stopped sending patches) because it was more work to liase with XFree86 than not to! I see good things ahead (but first we have a nice stable XFree86 4.4 replacement so there are no hiccups).

Re:Politics!

[wfberg]

I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails... But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting. By dropping Xfree, we no longer have any long-term alternatives (yeah, there are forks, but they haven't been around long enough to prove their stability or their worth).

a) this IS a fork
b) being as it is a fork, it is XFree, the latest version before the license change, just being improved and such.
c) you might have read the press release about who is supporting it - a whole lot of people. They are now no longer behind XFree.
d) XFree was a fork of the reference implementation of X, the latter being made by the X.org people to begin with.

The only question is; how many XFree86 developers will jump ship to X.org? My guess is, most of them. By changing the license, the XFree86 project has made itself irrelevant, and who want to work on an irrelevant open source project? Yes, if people continue using XFree86, you'd get credited on manuals etc., but already RedHat, SuSE and debian are moving to X.org; so you'd be credited in places no one gets to see anyway, and your patches are of no use to anyone.

Re:"...likely become the default X11 for most user

[meadowsp]

What you're crying like a baby at them, Mr Scotsman?

Proprietary drivers should target it

[rolling_bits]

Please tell ATI and everyone that releases proprietary drivers to target this server ! Tks

Re:Proprietary drivers should target it

[Hatta]

Huh? If you're using proprietary drivers, you obviously don't care about software freedom. In which case just use the relicensed XFree86.

Re:Politics!

[james b]

I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that quite a lot is outdated about X. Some examples (feel free to correct me or add more):

• lack of alpha blending
• lack of native understanding of antialiasing, shading etc in the drawing primitives
• insufficient speed to do things like play video (video etc usually seem to need to do some kind of direct hardware access to play smoothly)
• X forgets a window's contents when it's covered over - try moving a large window over the front of a browser window quickly and see the slow redraw going on behind.
• flickery movement - I don't know if this is a double-buffering type problem or what, but it seems to be difficult to animate large primitives without them flickering as they move.
• no abstraction of GUI toolkits: this one's debatable, but in the early (athena etc) widget sets, buttons were boxes or circles with text in them. Now they're big, coloured, shaded items that animate when clicked, but all of this must be sent over the X protocol as a series of bitmaps with some font information. I think it's time that some higher-level information was sent (for example, abstracting an entire widget set so it can be rendered client side).

There are fixes for some of this stuff (see the Xrender extensions, for example) but they will only really be extensions - Xrender degrades gracefully into standard X, which is nice, but this sort of cruft will keep building up.

Re:"...likely become the default X11 for most user

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dumbass! It's "I for one, welcome our new X11R6.7 of the X Window System overlords!". You need to learn how to kiss-ass better...

Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?

Too many politcs in Linux :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Except in Slackware Linux. You can use XFree86 4.4 :) :) The GNU and others don't like the BSD-style licenses so they have to fork?? It's crazy! I think FreeBSD is not as much involved in politics as Linux. In FreeBSD you can install and use open source no matter if is GPL'ed or BSD'ed or whatever. It's time to switch!! No more Linux-politics. I just want something that works and OS/FS preferably.

Re:Too many politcs in Linux :(

[Anonymous Coward]

It's GNU/Linux. GNU is an OS missing a kernel, and Linux is a kernel. If you add Linux to GNU, you have a complete OS ==> "GNU/Linux".

Re:Too many politcs in Linux :(

[FooBarWidget]

Those who don't live by politics die by politics. If you don't vote against the next Hitler who knows what may happen.

Re:Too many politcs in Linux :(

[Dwonis]

That said, it's better to not vote than to make an uninformed/apathetic vote.

Re:Too many politcs in Linux :(

[FooBarWidget]

So it's better to find information then vote, than not vote at all.

Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware is sticking with Xfree 4.4.x and Dropline is moving over to X.org

Re:The Evidence is Clear and Overwhelming

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet here you are.

not all of them...

[MenTaLguY]

X forgets a window's contents when it's covered over - try moving a large window over the front of a browser window quickly and see the slow redraw going on behind.

Actually, that one's not an X problem at all. The X specification includes server-side double-buffering, but XFree86 never bothered to implement it properly (and they weren't very good about accepting patches from others).

Hopefully the X.org fork should be less stagnant, and long-standing issues like that can finally get fixed.

Re:Politics!

[AVryhof]

What about:

Debian - Who better?
Novell - If your going to include IBM and RedHat,
why not Novell? They are now SUSE, and are
focusing on interoperability.

Gentoo e-build

[akulbe]

I just installed the e-build that's already in the tree. And told etc-update to automatically update all 200+ config files. >:) (crazy I know, but it works) make sure you read the info on the release notes page, and see what portage tells you at the end of the emerge. There is some useful info there.

The only thing I've seen so far, that I don't like, is a little bit of degradation of quality in the AA of fonts. I'm sure this is just a configuration issue, that I haven't found the answer to yet. But it's definitely usable right now. You will have to unmerge xfree and xft, as they are blocked by "xorg-x11" which is the name of the new e-build.

Cheers, and please share any useful info you might come up with.

Re:Gentoo e-build

[Internet_Communist]

The degradation of fonts could be caused by the bytecode interpreter in freetype being turned on/off. I prefer it off even though it's supposedly better with it on. Apparently there's some legal issues with it so previously it was default off. No idea if this is your problem, but you can try USE="bindist" emerge freetype or USE="-bindist" emerge freetype and see what happens.

Re:Gentoo e-build

[akulbe]

This fixed the problem. Once I emerged freetype, all is well. AA fonts are good as new.

The irony being...

[Theatetus]

...that most of the distros and app developers would have probably been happy to include the notice XFree wants if it had been a personal request rather than a license term.

For grandparent post, the reason it's "not free enough" or whatever is that it imposes a restriction on redistribution that is incompatible with the GPL, and that slippery slope heads pretty quickly towards requiring advertisements for nVidia/Maxtor/Radeon/$INSERT_COMMERCIAL_COMPANY_HE RE every time they make a driver or library for Linux.

Re:Politics!

[m1a1]

Uhm... what is broken and outdated about X11?

I have a theory that defenders of XFree86 and X11 probably have at least one of two things in common: they either don't use other operating systems often or they are fans of simplicity and don't really have uses for certain functionality that a more advanced windowing system can offer. There are just so many things that X11 can't do. The one that most immediately jumps to mind is transparency. Real transparency, you know the kind where you i could have a terminal open over a konqueror window and see konqueror through it!

Yes I know, a lot of people think such a function is just eye candy. Well it can be (and there is nothing wrong with eye candy for the record). It can also be extremely useful. For instance, I really wouldn't mind having an OSX style dock that can be always on top, yet semi-transparent. I also wouldn't mind having X pass off the desktop rendering to my videocard to ease up on my processor a little.

I am not even saying X11 would have to be ditched completely to do these things. It wouldn't. In fact there are people experimenting with it. However, none of this is going to move into the mainstream until people accept that maybe X should change a little. So you like X, say you like it, but don't try and bullshit the world into believing it's perfect. X IS outdated and it ISN'T as feature rich as it could be. Will it get there? I hope so, but at the current rate of development it will take it awhile.

Re:Politics!

[n1ywb]

KDE - Why? They only deal with QT, not X. Trolltech might be a good choice.

Gnome - Why? They only deal with GTK, not X. Maybe you mean the GTK devs.

Why not? KDE and Gnome are the only two reasons why X might SOMEDAY be relevant to an average computer user. You do make good points about Trolltech and the GTK devs, though.

Apple - Why? Apple uses Quartz, they could care less about X and might even have an incentive to see it fail.

Again, why not? You don't think Apple might have some interest in having thousands of high-quality X Windows applications running on their OS? Sure they'd probably prefer if they all ran on Quartz but they sure as shoot aren't going to port them all. Compatibility is a huge, probably the biggest selling point for people looking to switch from 'nix to OS-X.

already more up to date than xfree86

[dpw2atox]

Well amoung a few small changes it appears that xorg's release is already more updated than xfree86. Some things I noticed that have been updated are FreeType2 (2.1.4 on XF86, 2.1.7 on Xorg), Fontconfig (2.2.1 on XF86, 2.2.2 on Xorg), and most likely others. I am personally very glad to see these updates as it will offer a better product to the end user. I am looking foward to their second release and currently running their latest release.

Re:Politics!

[10Ghz]

Now, you DO realize that just about everything on your list is a shortcoming of _Xfree_ and not _X_? X is is a protocol and it kicks ass. Xfree is an implementation of X. And it's Xfree that could use some improving. And, luckily, people are working on improving it (see the subject of this discussion). If you want better graphics right now, you might want to invest in one of the commercial X-implementations.

Re:Politics!

[Travis Fisher]

• Comments on suggested representatives:

  KDE - Why? They only deal with QT, not X. Trolltech might be a good choice.

  Gnome - Why? They only deal with GTK, not X. Maybe you mean the GTK devs.

How about trying to finally get usable clipboard support for the desktops? Maybe with the KDE and Gnome guys actually working on X (or with X developers) this increadible cluster-f*** can be made more sane. Not to mention asking for functional drag-and-drop.

More info on the clipboard mess here.

Re:"...likely become the default X11 for most user

[randomblast]

wow, AC's have mod powers now, and with options that us registered users don't get!!
How is that fair?

Compatibility?

[nurb432]

Ok, so what does this mean to the average person trying to compile existing apps to run on the 'new' X, or vice versa.

Does this fork blow compatibility and create *2* incompatible standards, or is this just a minor bump...

Some of us have long ago lost the interest in fighting with things to make them work.. we just want to make-install-run... ( or best case pkg_add -r )

Re:Compatibility?

[tuffy]

Ok, so what does this mean to the average person trying to compile existing apps to run on the 'new' X, or vice versa.

Your clients don't care whether they're connecting to the new X.org X11 server or the old one. They don't even care if they're running on Sun X server, or Apple's, or some obscure commercial one. Once compiled, they'll Just Work on any X11 server.

That's partly why X11 is so handy, and partly why it advances so slowly compared to other windowing systems that don't give a rat's ass about cross-platform, network-transparent compatibility.

Re:Compatibility?

[Kourino]

You realize that both of these are implementations of X11R6, a standard which hasn't changed in a non-backwards-compatible manner in something like a decade, right? This means jack shit to the average person compiling apps "against the new X", since both provide an implementation of Xlib. (Not only an implementation, but the same implementation!)

This is roughly equivalent to worrying if plain vanilla POSIX programs will compile against newlib instead of glibc. There's absolutely nothing to see here. The only possible problem is drivers maintained out-of-tree for whatever reason, but that probably won't become an issue for some time since X11R6.7 is almost exactly XFree86 4.4.0.

Re:Y11 Release 6.7

[amightywind]

A bit like Prince, you know?

Perhaps we should call the new release "The Window System Formerly Known as X"

Re:Politics!

[gabebear]

For what reason would Sun or IBM want to see X11 die? They both depend on it (i.e. Solaris and AIX). I can see how Apple and Microsoft would benefit.

Y Windows

[bonch]

Website for those interested.

The PDF there describes all the reasons they're replacing X, and they make sense. They're planning to get a 1.0 release out the door within a year. It's going to be vector-based, hardware-accelerated and so on.

I think it will eventually be the superior technology to X, which is so riddle with extensions that they're conflicting each other now.

"scared"

[Anonymous Coward]

Your being "scared" is just more proof that Linux users are absolutely afraid of change.

They want the world to be using godawful X for another 20 years as the rest of the modern computing world innovates new technologies to replace their old ones. Slashdotters will be stuck with KDE/GNOME on top of QT/GTK on top of a window manager on top of XFree86 (I'm sorry, XServer...which will *gasp* add transparency).

Re:Politics!

[klasikahl]

Apple, IBM, Sun, Microsoft would all love to make the spec so complex and braindead that it would bury X for good.

Yes, IBM would love to see something so important to desktop Linux fail... Which is precisely why they pour billions of dollars into Linux (a lot of which likely goes to desktop devel) on an annual basis.

Nice assertion.

B-but...

[bonch]

Y-you mean a distro is using it and the world didn't explode?! Their apps didn't die?!

I don't understand!

Case in point...

[bonch]

Not only the fact that it took so damned long for something like RandR to appear, but we STILL don't have true alpha-blending and transparencies.

I'm sorry folks, but other GUIs have had this forever. Windows 2000 supported it directly back in the late '99 betas.

The Linux kernel makes incredible strides constantly. Mozilla and Firefox can't seem to stop putting out minor version updates, to the joy of all. But XFree86? It takes five fucking years to get major new features that should have been there from the beginning. People bitch at Microsoft for Windows not having certain things integrated in from the beginning, claiming it's impossible to truly hack things in that weren't designed that way from the ground up, yet we wait on hands and knees for the next "extension" to come along. Why the incredible difference in development pace compared to other open source projects? KDE and GNOME are putting out new releases all the time.

The Y-Windows paper even talks about how the extensions are conflicting with each other now (i.e., Xinerama and XVideo). Why do we do this to ourselves? Let's get some real development going! First step is making the development of X more open, or contributing to projects like Y which intend to start over and include an X compatibility layer for older apps. Personally, I'm looking forward to Y.

MS already has true alpha

[greygent]

and they've had it since Windows 2000, sorry.

Re:MS already has true alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

i think he meant a GOOD alpha blending, come on, win2k had it, but it was a sad implementation

Re:MS already has true alpha

[greygent]

Actually it's a pretty good implementation. Far better than any pseudo-alpha blending most Linux packages have.

I don't know why you would say it was sad, other than being a troll.

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like...what else?

You are saying that you want transparency...ok, what else?

If it's SO outdated, there should be more examples, right?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I just wish that orgasms would live on, and on, and on, and on... Oh, you were talking about software though. Rather easy to get it mixed up with ones hardware.

Why not?

[DeadVulcan]

Why would they name themselves Y (no pun intended)?

Why not?

That's why I think they should call it Y!11R6

Or maybe it should be Y!Y11R6... Y!X11R6? Or heck, just get to the point and call it !X11R6.

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you, Mr. Troll.

You already can

[Anonymous Coward]

$ which [
/usr/bin/[
$ file `which [`
/usr/bin/[: symbolic link to test

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

">and radically simplify software development."
"So X12 will be written in Lisp :) I'd go jump on that bandwagon!"

That would rock! Oo, oo - better still, impliment NeWS in Lisp! :-)

Possible solution...

[warrax_666]

I think you have hit a bug in Portage itself... I seem to recall something very similar happening to my system when I removed a virtual (can't remember which one I'm afraid). You probably need to look for any suspicious looking virtuals (i.e. anything to do with X) in /var/cache/edb/virtuals and remove them manually.

Re:mutt? - esmtp

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at ESMTP, which just forwards mail to your ISP's SMTP server. And if it can't connect, it fails immediately (mail won't get stuck in your local queue and bounce a few hours later, like Sendmail would do). It can also be installed and configured without root privileges.

There's also a mutt patch for SMTP support, using the same library as the above program. If you try it and find it useful, ask your distro to include it by default.

XFree86 4.4 on Alpha is alive and well

[derinax]

It marks the first release that compiles cleanly and works predictably well and solidly on NetBSD/Alpha with full acceleration on modern cards. I don't believe the Alpha platform or NetBSD-specific fixes are even on the radar for the X.org releases.

Someone prove me wrong? I think I'd be the only one to ever compile X.org on NetBSD / Alpha if I tried-- so why bother?

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's outdated and broken?

That 3D is a bolted-on (DRI) protocol instead of the foundation of everything. No one is making graphics cards for X. They are making graphics cards for OpenGL and Direct3D.

The first thing X needs is a complete rework. There's no reason you shouldn't have an alternative window system sitting on top of an OpenGL/shader/overlay scaler driver. Let alternative window system pass OpenGL etc. to the hardware driver (or to a software driver OR a network for true platform independence). I'm hoping this would also simplify the driver model to encourage the hardware vendors to actually maintain good drivers.

Let alternative window system deal with all kinds of wonky precisions, color depths, and *gasp* even floating point pixels! And why not add sound? Why shouldn't sound pass over a network as readily as graphics calls?

It already is the default X11 tree in Fedora

[ZuperDee]

Gee, I guess it wasn't obvious enough already that this would happen.

The point is that we will fork again if they do

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's your point?

Not True

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun contributed i386 support to X11 from their Sun 386i machines (which they stopped making shortly after). But Sun later made a Solaris version for x86 which also had X11 support. Maybe you mean it didn't support many video cards or that the support was inflexible and was only designed to support one vendor's products?

So many X's, which one to choose?

[shish]

So I'm seeing X.org, freedesktop.org, the old xfree86, X-on-framebuffer, that guy's X + alpha blending project. Y is also coming along nicely, and is supposed to be backwards compatible with the right modules.

Why are there so many? Which should I be using? Which are being left to die in order shift progress-making to another branch?

Re:So many X's, which one to choose?

[dbIII]

Why are there so many?

X11R6 is a standard, the others are implementaions. In my workplace there are six different implementations of X running on five different operating systems, and a seventh which ran on a trial licence for a while. Some of them run on various flavours of windows and have features that cygwin doesn't do well yet. They are all different programs, but apart from some colour depth problems (fixed by changing the local display settings) thay can all run remote X windows programs from a variety of hosts.

Which should I be using?

Whichever you like, it's all X. It comes down to what hardware you have, what OS, price considerations etc. There is a very good cheap commercial implementation of X that gets around a lot of the XFree86 problems, but it doesn't support Nvidia cards and I am a cheapskate so I don't use it, since Xfree86 and derivatives runs well on my hardware. There's a crappy commercial implemention of X on winNT and up, which can be very easily configured by the users and handles shaped windows - so it's numerous crashes and 8 bit colour can be tolerated since cygwin doesn't beat it yet in key areas. It's actually easier to set up linux with XFree86 and Win4Lin than it is to give the people I work with a decent, relatively cheap X setup on Windows (most things are done using X to run programs on *nix boxes anyway - so why use windows? That godawful program powerpoint is still the major impediment). Howerever cygwin has made some huge improvements in the last year.

I want freedom to use my two monitors

[rolling_bits]

I want freedom to use my two monitors in a dual head setup. Do you know a Free driver that supports it for an ATI radeon 9600xt ?

Re:I want freedom to use my two monitors

[Hatta]

My point was, if you're already willing to use non-free software to get something done, there's little reason not to use the relicensed X.

Nothing personal, I use proprietary nvidia drivers myself.

Re:I want freedom to use my two monitors

[Synic]

The relicensed X is not "non-free." It just says that they have to put credits in the source and documentation for anything using the Xfree86 derived stuff. I really still don't see what the big fuss is about.

Good job distributions

[MicroBerto]

I'm very glad that the major distributions took charge and dropped XFree86. While it might not have been *completely* necessary, it sent quite a message. XFree86 is about to die. Don't mess with the GPL or you're gone next.

This just gave the GPL a lot more strength, and all non-conforming licenses a lot less. You can bet that nobody else is going to test Redhat/Debian/Mandrake/etc, or else your project is done for.

Re:Good job distributions

[entrigant]

It's so easy to get an informative moderation these days...


2. Licensing

X Window System source code is covered by many licenses. All of these
licenses have in common the fact that they do not impose significant condi-
tions on the modification or redistribution or either source code or binaries
beyond requiring one or more of the following:

1. Copyright and/or license notices are left intact.

2. Copyright and/or license notices are reproduced verbatim in documenta-
tion accompanying binary distributions.

3. Attributions are included with documentation accompanying binaries.

Most of these licenses are based on the MIT, X Consortium, or BSD (original
and revised) licenses. All of them are consistent with the Open Source Defi-
nition, and most are consistent with the Free Software Foundation's Free
Software Definition.

You see GPL anywhere in there? These licenses are non-comforming licenses. The GPL is MUCH more restrictive. The whole reason the recent xfree86 license switch is controversial is because they added more restrictions! The GPL isn't the end all and be all of licenses, and much free software does not use it. Sorry to disappoint.

See this for a workaround:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47105

Some clients do care

[nurb432]

I've had clients which required a particular extension or they refused to work..

So its not going to be a case of 100% not caring..

But from the way it sounds most will do fine.. which is ok with me..

GPL question

[Roark Meets Dent]

If I am a programmer who submits code to a GPL project, can the project leaders legally change the licence a year later if it still includes the code I submitted, believing it was GPL??? It seems to me that doing so constitutes an attempted theft.

Re:GPL question

[FooBarWidget]

If you submit GPL'ed code to a GPL'ed project, and they accepted your code, and they want to change the project's license, then they have 2 choices:
1. Ask every contributor whether he agrees on the license change. Only if everybody agrees, the license can be changed.
2. If not everybody agrees, then they can remove your code and write their own, and change license anyway.

So no - once your code has been GPL'ed, it cannot be relicensed, unless you agree.

Re:GPL question

[Roark Meets Dent]

Was there any question such as I asked when XFree86 changed their license? Were there people who had submitted code not anticipating the change? Just curious.

Re:GPL question

[FooBarWidget]

I'm not entirely sure but as far as I know, the X11 license (and BSD licenses) allows you to relicense the code even without other contributors' permission.

Re:GPL question

[Piksou]

You can always relicence as long as the new licence is compatible with the old one. No licence is GPL-compatible and will ever be so if you want to change the licence of a GPL code, you have to override the licence, wich can only be done by the copyright's holder
If the code is for example under unrevised BSD (with the publicity clause), you can't change the licence to GPL without the copyright's holder's consent.
If it's under MIT, new BSD, old X11 (original X11 NOT the new XF86), etc. then the code may be directy published under GPL since those licence do not add extra restrictions and do not forbid anyway the use of GPL.
XF86 was under X11-like licences so it was possible to add a restriction. If your code is under GPL only the copyright holder can change the licence

WARNING: author != copyright's holder if you have transfered your right to another entity (FSF, University of Berkley, for example). Some projects do require this to accept your contribution)

Re:The Evidence is Clear and Overwhelming

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm here as an observer, not a participant. Quick; if you look in the mirror you can see yourself! Can you tell which of the fools is you?

Spin job!

[steveha]

I think it was a masterful bit of spin on David Dawes's part. I don't think it succeeds, but it's impressive anyway.

I think the big Linux vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, and the license change was just the steel girder that broke the camel's back. XFree86, as an organization, has had increasing bad publicity: patches languishing, weird political in-fighting, organizational chaos. The license change got a whole bunch of people, all at once, to stop muttering in annoyance and actually fork the project. (Maybe we should thank XFree86 for making it happen so quickly.)

Another priceless bit of spin: now XFree86 can now get back to its roots, distributing software directly to end users. That sounds much better than "all the Linux distros are dumping us like last month's garbage".

XFree86, both the organization and the software, will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know whether they will actually disappear, but it's safe to stop paying attention to them.

steveha

http://www.the-g-spot.ca/

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, the G-spot's in Canada? No wonder I couldn't find it.

Re:Politics!

[molarmass192]

Well, that's because there's a CLIPBOARD -and- a PRIMARY. KDE focuses on the PRIMARY while Gnome focuses on the CLIPBOARD. The problem is that the CLIPBOARD and PRIMARY are not exactly the same. The CLIPBOARD is supposed to be for explicit cut-and-paste ops while the PRIMARY is what's used for mouse highlighting, at least in theory. Beyond that theory, it's app specific which is used in preference.

It's about time...

[Roadkills-R-Us]

... that we again had a "vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation".

We've had some innovation, but it was definitely slowing down. But vibrant community? More of a dysfunctional family. (Not that everyone was dysfunctional, by a long shot, but the leadership mix clearly wasn't working.) Having the sole focus be the PC community always worried me, too. (Yeah, I know it's the largets by orders of magnitude, but the cross-platform expertise and disciplines have a lot to offer.)

In the early days, anyone who wanted to contribute did, and it all worked rather well. X was one of the first *major* open source projects to really take off. I, for one, am glad to see it back in a form that has a chance to really start kicking some proprietary booty again.

XFree86 to lose multi-platform?

[steveha]

Up until version 4.0, the XFree86 guys were getting multi-platform development for free: Debian took care of it. Debian cares a great deal about supporting multiple platforms, and Debian builds everything on a bunch of platforms and contributes back bug fixes. They were doing that for XFree86.

Now Debian is simply going to walk away from XFree86. The XFree86 project will either have to suddenly do a whole bunch of work to keep the multi-platform nature of XFree86, or else the "86" part is going to mean something again.

I find it amazing that the XFree86 guys ever thought that this license change was a good idea, and that they aren't falling all over themselves to reverse it now that the consequences are becoming clear.

steveha

Re:XFree86 to lose multi-platform?

[AReilly]

NetBSD has X in the base distribution, and they've upgraded to XFree86-4.4. Not sure how many of their 40+ supported architectures support X, but it's bound to be more than just x86.

Not Coding X

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with the protocol. The two issues are:

1) Noone has any legal right to distribute GPLd packages linked against the new XFree86 libraries, due to the attribution clause in the new license.

2) The XFree86 board was taking to long to accept, reject, or even acknowledge 3rd party patches (like vendor supplied driver updates).

Screw that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell ATI and everyone that releases proprietary drivers to disclose their specs!

Distribution vs Use

[ingenuus]

In this case Sun is probably taking advantage of the "system libraries" exception in GPL section 3

As another poster pointed out, the relevant parts of GNOME are actually LGPL. This is why KDE/QT is still not fully embraced by much of the community -- because QT is licensed under the GPL (on linux) and therefore cannot be used for proprietary apps. You can purchase a commercial license for QT, but I'm not sure if that would extend to the rest of KDE whose license must remain compatible with the GPL version.

But you make a good point -- in fact, it seems that it's not just "system libraries", but also compiler libraries (which seems like a loophole if someone distributes a proprietary compiler package with a bunch of proprietary libraries).

From the GPL FAQ:
I'm writing a Windows application with Microsoft Visual C++ (or Visual Basic) and I will be releasing it under the GPL. Is dynamically linking my program with the Visual C++ (or Visual Basic) run-time library permitted under the GPL?

Yes, because that run-time library normally accompanies the compiler or interpreter you are using.

Another aspect I've been pondering is defining "distribution" versus "usage". If the GPL only restricts distribution, then what is to prevent the creation of a program (to be invoked by users) that automatically downloads (from various sources) and combines GPL code and some proprietary code? ... i.e. this would technically shift the actual creation of a derivative work to the user, who in turn could not distribute the resulting app.

It seems like a loophole that I'm sure someone else has thought of, so I'm probably missing something. But without restricting certain modification or "usage" of a program, I'm not sure how this could be overcome.

The point is...

[edinho]

Goodwill.

XFree has lost the goodwill of the the community. X.org foundation was created out of the goodwill of the community. If, in the future, X.org foundation also lose the goodwill of the community, then the community will create another X2.org foundation. If the community cares enough, of course. Right now, the community cares.

It will be good to keep in mind that the main reason that human dealings can take place is because of goodwill. When goodwill is lacking, usually bad things result.

Cheers,
e.

GPL incompatibility is a problem of practicality

[dwheeler]

The problem is that GPL-incompatible programs cause a host of practical problems. The majority of all open source software / Free Software (OSS/FS), counting by number of packages or lines of code, uses the GPL. You don't have to use the GPL license, but creating an OSS/FS a license intentionally incompatible with it causes lots of practical problems. See my essay on using GPL compatible licenses for more information.

XRender

[tepples]

The XFree86 client libs are not affected by the license change

Some of them are. The core Xlib isn't yet affected, but the XRender client library is, making it impossible for GPL apps to link to XFree86 4.4's XRender extension.

Upgrade paths are uncertain == FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

"The XFree86 client libs are not affected by the license change, so if there's a GPL compatibility problem with XFree86 right now, what is it? Let's have it."

If you don't care about upgrade paths, I suppose there is no problem, since the problem with using XFree86 4.4.0 right now is that the upgrade path is legally uncertain.

In other words, there is no problem right now. No direct answers from you. Speculating on the uncertain future is pure FUD, and if there's no problem right now then it's not the license that prompted a fork. This was a power play for control of X, and the license was a great excuse. I think most people who've been around for a while have probably picked up on this by now.

Re:Upgrade paths are uncertain == FUD

[dpw2atox]

and what your saying is that you don't care about the future as long as its ok now......you ever hear about the story of the ant and the grasshopper? maybe you should check it out. This isn't just about the license change. Its about creating an open environment for the development of X. While XFree86 made a good product there were very closed to new ideas and adding new developers. Xorg is being open and trying to make this a community driven project and I have nothing but the highest respect for these people. So you might not care about whether the license will change or not but if it does and you set up a nice new linux machine and suddenly only have xffm installed because no other guis can be packaged with it because of license issues I have a feeling your gonna be kinda ticked.

Distribution of software

[tepples]

Doesn't the GPL only really apply to distribution of software?

Fedora Core is a distribution of software. Mandrakelinux is a distribution of software. The distributors of software will standardize on something that they are permitted to distribute, and only XOrg's XRender client libraries are compatible with GPL apps.

Technically, a user at home can link anything they want to.

You're referring to the exemption of 17 USC 117(a)(1), which is rather narrow.

X suicide?

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost wonder if the X Consortium decided to change the license not because they thought their new license was better or something, but because they finally realized that X is too old and needs to be replaced. So the license change could have been a ploy to kill X and force a new project to take over.

There is a real problem

[Chuck Chunder]

There is a lack of confidence in XFree86.

FUD is something that is spread.

The vendors and people who have split from XFree86 have reached their own conclusion that XFree86 isn't working for them as well as it should be. That isn't FUD, it's an appraisal of the situation they are faced with going forward.

The licence change isn't an 'excuse', it's just the latest issue.

Fedora has switched to this

[brsmith4]

For those of you that aren't aware, Fedora Core 2 will include X.org's implementation of X11. I found the packages while browsing the development directory on one of my mirrors. Also of note, were the nice gnome-2.6.0 packages all laid out for my downloading pleasure. Ahem, offtopic, but does anyone know why the release of gnome 2.6 has not been mentioned, despite the fact that it occured almost a week ago?

Modular Tree

[Crazy Eight]

Are you referring to the "autotoolization" work going on at freedesktop? If so, does Debian intend to use that branch, and package the installation with the directory conventions of other apps, i.e. stop segregating most of X under it's own directory?

Re:Politics!

[Anonymous Coward]

umm.. Quartz is based on xfree.

how to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFL
well, that's one way to learn "how to ..." post comments in /.

A question....

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a major release, a bug fix, or just a political victory?

With Release X.Org Seals Fate of XFree86

[darthcamaro]

The guys at internetnews.com wrote a good story on this whole thing that I've linked here

Short answer

[fooishbar]

Yes.

Re:Short answer

[Crazy Eight]

Cool.