XOrg Foundation Opens Membership and Elections

XOrg Foundation writes "To active developers and users of the X Window System:You are invited to join and help shape the direction of the new X.Org Foundation. Membership in the X.Org Foundation is now open and free.Applications for membership are sought from all contributors to the X and Desktop communities." Read more below for the rest of the information from the foundation.

The Interim Board of directors has established that examples of acceptable
contributions that will qualify you for membership in the Foundation include
coding, bug-fixing, testing, design, documentation, translation,
administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, speaking at
conferences, and supporting bugzilla or release management.

Should you wish to apply for free membership in the X.Org Foundation, then
please visit:

http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html

All Members are eligible for election to the Board of Directors and the
Architecture Group of the XOrg Foundation. The XOrg Foundation is now
seeking nominations for candidates for election to these groups.

Nominations for each election are open until 23.59 PDT on Friday 30th April
2004 for those Members of the X.Org Foundation who wish to stand for
election. You may nominate yourself for election. You may not nominate any
other member.

There will be 8 people elected to each of the Board of Directors and the
Architecture Group. In this first year of the X.Org Foundation, the four
candidates polling the most votes in each election will be granted a two
year term of office (until June 2006), and the next four candidates will
receive 1 year term of office (until June 2005). In subsequent years, four
seats of each group will be re-elected in the annual elections.

It is permissible for a candidate to stand for election for both the Board
of Directors and the Architecture Group.

The responsibilities of an elected person are detailed in the current
Bylaws of the X.Org Foundation, which can be found at:

http://www.x.org/XOrg_ByLaws_17Sep03.pdf

In addition, an elected person will be required to attend the annual
meeting of the X.Org Foundation, which will be held a location determined
in advance by the Board of Directors.

Should you wish to enter your candidacy for these elections, then please
prepare a personal statement of up to 200 words that can be provided to
prospective voters. This statement, and the statement of contribution to
the X.Org Foundation (which you completed when applying for membership)
will be made available to all voters to help them make their voting
decisions.

Once you have completed your personal statement, then you may visit:

http://www.x.org/member/XOrg_Foundation_Election_N omination.tpl

to enter your candidacy for the X.Org Foundation elections.

We look forward to your membership and candidacy submissions,

The Interim Board
X.Org Foundation."

Comments

What ever happened to simple OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why must we have elections, and official positions? Just open source it, and let the community decide what's best for the project.

Why?

[mtenhagen]

Does anyone know why they are doing this?

Whas the organisation failing apart and they are desperate for new members?
Or are they financially healthy and want to grow bigger this way?

Re:Why?

[vossman77]

My understanding is that Keith Packard (had guy right now) had griefs over the approx. lifetime membership in the xfree86 project. The xfree86 blocked new developers from coming on and kept old uninterested developers onteh staff. Keith wanted the whole system to be more open and that is why he forked. This is his method for the new system.

Forks

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't there quite a few forks of XFree86 at this point? Shouldn't we be worried about fragmentation? How can you develop for Linux if you now have to worry about the graphic subsystem as well?

(First Post?!?)

XF86.Org....

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting way to go tell XF86.Org to go pound sand.. First release their old licensed code, then demonstrate how much more open your board of directors is... I think I like it..

I hope they solve

[UltimaGuy]

the myriad of problems users of GUI in Linux face. I mean, common, it surely pisses me if I have to edit a config file by hand if I install any nvidia driver. Also, I hate to do it again when I recompile a new kernel.
Also, I hope they provide a solid backdrop from where desktop linux can emerge.

Re:I hope they solve

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you think an improved X will solve Linux's "Gui problems"?

" it surely pisses me if I have to edit a config file by hand if I install any nvidia driver. "

So blame Nvidia. Why doesn't their install routine do this? Come on now we are not talking about rocket science here. Parsing a text file and changing a few lines is something ANY first year CS student can figure out why can't Nvidia?

"Also, I hope they provide a solid backdrop from where desktop linux can emerge."

The Linux desktop isn't going anywhere until the big ISV's, Adobe, Intuit, etc all support it. More importantly Linux needs be a a tier one OS that's available preloaded on every Dell, HP, and IBM desktop sold. X isn't the reason Linux isn't there yet, lack of real support from the big commercial companies is. You want to see real marketshare for the Linux desktop? That's not gonna happen until the big boys decide on it.

People keep talking about how Linux needs to change at a fundemental level so that is worthy of building on for the desktop. In reality all we need is change at a fundemental level for Linux to well on the desktop. Technically there is no reason why Linux can't be used as a desktop by anyone. But realistically people won't seriously consider Linux until it A) comes preloaded on a siginificant amount of machines and B) can run all of the apps they are used to. I agree, improving X good thing. But let's not forget what's really holding Linux back.

GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this remain GPL? The X.org website has a lot of talk about benefits of corporate membership, and says they will periodically release software to the general public free of charge. I though X.org was a GPL alternative to Xfree86 after the much discussed liscense change.

Re:Rant time!!

[SmackCrackandPot]

In other words:

Gripe 1: A packet gets sent EVERY TIME THE CURSOR BLINKS!

Could it be possible to specify the cursor blink rate in X-windows?

Gripe 2: Why does the ENTIRE app need to redraw itself (using huge amounts of network bandwidth) every time I obscure it with a window or hop to another virtual desktop???

Could X-windows support display lists like OpenGL?

Re:Rant time!!

[FooBarWidget]

Look, if you want them to listen to you, then calm down and don't use CAPITALS or "????!!!!" all over the place. It makes you look like a zealot with emotional problems.

Anyway... a large part of the slowness over the network are caused by the toolkit and the apps, not by the protocol itself! QT and GTK do not use the X protocol efficiently.
Until the toolkits and apps are fixed, use NX compression. I heard it does wonders and makes Mozilla usable even over a modem.

Only Nvidia can solve that,

[anti-NAT]

by openning up their hardware programming specifications.

I have none of the problems you mention, and that is because my video card has open programming specifications.

Re:Only Nvidia can solve that,

[yarbo]

which card do you use? I'd like to support that company

Why would they?

[Jason Hood]

They sell graphics cards. They dont care if linux/X or MS succeeds. It makes no difference for them. They would probably prefer one OS existed so that they only have to write drivers for one platform.

I bet they just wait it out and continue to support xfree86. There is no reason for them to act. In that respect, this is a setback to linux/X. Uncertainty has not been a good environment for technology investments since the dotcom bust. How many people buy their high end cards for windows as opposed to Mac or Linux? My guess is 90%-5%-5%.

Re:Why would they?

[tiger99]

I don't know about ATI, but the Nvidia driver seems to contain a large block which is common to Windoze, Linux (and maybe BSD?), and another part which is GPLed and is the kernel interface, produced as a normal loadable module. Frankly, I don't care what happens inside the proprietary bit, if they want to keep it that way, that is their right, although it may be silly. If it helps them to quickly write one driver which works with any OS, that is good.

It would not actually help a competitor if they did reveal their driver code, after all, anyone who can design a huge ASIC is going to ba able to reverse engineer both the code and the silicon, if they want to, and it would be far better to publish the full spec, with as many copyrights and/or patents as they feel necessary. But, some managements (Canon come to mind, for a start) take a very immature view of the negative implications of full disclosure, imagining it to be a therat to their business. It is simply not so, if they get the FOSS community on board, they get, at no cost to themselves, an extra resource for debugging, amongst other things, and they maximise their market penetration, regardless of which way the OS wars go. It does matter, in some parts of the world, Linux is all but universal, or heading that way, and surely the major manufacturers want to sell their products in China, Brazil, India,..... But, I guess that openness is something that some people simply can't understand.

Meanwhile, I am quite happy to use Nvidia cards. What is actually a nuisance is that certain Linux suppliers (SuSE comes to mind, I think there are others) do not supply the Nvidia driver, allegedly for legal reasons, while the Nvidia web site says that you can distribute it, or even repackage it or change the installer. That makes it a right pain to install, also the details about how you do it, to get Yast to recognise the new driver and be able to configure it, are buried deeply on the SuSE web site, and can not be found by a logical search through the support pages.

I think there is a lot of stupidity here, people need to talk to each other and sort this sort of thing out, then, binary or not, the Nvidia driver would be easily useable, and acceptable to most people. When it is installed, it tends to work rather well, certainly on my laptop (Gforce 2 Go) and the 2 desktops which have Nvidia cards, one with Twinview or Xinerama, or whatever they call it. (I can run it both ways, both screens identical, or giving a single wide screen, haven't needed the two fully independent screens yet).

As to the capabilities of Xfree86, my oldest machine is a K6/II-500 with an ATI Rage Fury card which was an absolute pig to configure and get working under Windoze 95/98/ME/XP, but it now runs Xandros, which despite certain deficiencies which I hope they fix soon, installed the X server with zero fuss and bother, and it works. But, I think X as we know it is getting old, and it is time for a complete re-think. This should happen with software, every so often you should throw away the old one and start again, it does not say that the old was bad, only that technology has advanced, so different methods might now be practicable. It is worth re-examining from first principles what we actually need a graphics card to do nowadays, and how work can be shared between the card and the CPU(s). Failed efforts like the Tablet PC might give rise to new ideas, these presumably have a CPU on the mobile bit, which could perhaps be reprogrammed as a full X server or equivalent, given a nice tidy protocol to work with, not messy Windoze GDI calls.

It is quite amazing what programmable logic can do nowadays, building a software and hardware prototype of a new graphical subsystem as an open-source project is not out of the question, although some of the fancy features, textures and bump mapping, for instance, might need to be left out at first. But, it would be nice to see a new, open architecture evolve, and the time may be right for this to happen.