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XGL Development Opens Up

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the prying-open-the-doors dept.

An anonymous reader writes "David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available for download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticized for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg."

18 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Nice to see more openness. by jZnat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No free (gratis) software should be proprietary; that's just a general rule! If you're giving your software away free of charge, people generally would like to contribute back whether it be in donations, patches, QA, etc. With a closed-source model, you're blocking off the useful traffic of free bugfixes! If your software is useful in the corporate world, it's also likely that some companies will contribute back if they tinker around with it enough.

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    1. Re:Nice to see more openness. by heatdeath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, there are certain circumstances where it makes sense - if you're not sure where you want the project to go, but you want to give people the benefit of your code for right now. If you opensource it, you're pretty much condemning any potential you had for making money off of the code. Of course, there are those on this forum that would claim that that's wrong...but it's still a valid reason to keep your source proprietary.

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    2. Re:Nice to see more openness. by jZnat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How do you explain how TrollTech makes money with a GPL'd program (Qt and its official frameworks)? Or how CodeWeavers makes money off of CrossOver Office when WINE is Free in both ways? Or how RedHat makes money off of providing a Linux distro + support when there is Fedora Core, their fully Free distro of RedHat?

      Old business models die hard, and the new methods are proving to be a success. Even Novell, IBM, Apple, Sun, and others are benefitting financially from Free software.

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    3. Re:Nice to see more openness. by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How do you explain how TrollTech makes money with a GPL'd program (Qt and its official frameworks)? Or how CodeWeavers makes money off of CrossOver Office when WINE is Free in both ways? Or how RedHat makes money off of providing a Linux distro + support when there is Fedora Core, their fully Free distro of RedHat?

      1. Commercial versions for closed source, "free sample"
      2. Need for constant upgrades to make new software work
      3. Need for constant upgrades to make new software work
      4. Repackaging the works of others, "free sample" of RHEL

      There are countless applications where you'd barely be able to scrape together a living if it were OSS. Seriously, how many of the OSS applications you have on your computer have you bought support for? I can tell you mine is a big fat zero. Particularly if you're competing against a good user community for providing support. For a more typical project you may get the odd paypal donation but I sure wouldn't want to rely on that for a living...

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    4. Re:Nice to see more openness. by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most sales come from corporate users, and corporate users are also more likely to buy support.. Joe enduser is not likely to buy support, and is also likely to copy any software his friends have..
      Selling software to end consumers is a lot of hassle, and far less profitable than selling to corporate users, so these companies don't sell to end users, they give it to them for free.

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    5. Re:Nice to see more openness. by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And in a free market all software would end up being sold at it's true value, which is also pretty minimal. The only way to make money would be in support contracts, and minimal profits from distribution/packaging.

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    6. Re:Nice to see more openness. by The+Great+Wazzoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm not going to make myself any popular by this, but... the OSS community needs to learn to view and promote their work from a market perspective.

      The majority of OSS projects is mainly running on proud, and that won't get you anywhere. Now, don't get me wrong! Being proud of your work is absolutely essential. It's essential for getting the job done, for being able to implement your ideas, for, well, being motivated.

      But proud is proven to become a killer the instant you're going to sell your product - countless of business don't survive their first years because of just that: proud (and yes, if an OSS project is to survive, it's got to sell its product, although not neccesarily for money). And why would proud be a killer? Because your proud is merely based on YOUR view of the product, and that'll be for the majority of the OSS community the technical view, and the hard reality is that that's NOT of interest to 99% of your audience.

      And boy, can proud be persistant, and can your technical background be blocking the view from that other perspective: the customer perspective. Not being able to tame your proud makes that your audience just doesn't get what on earth you're doing, and what value your product is to them.

      Keep your proud, and keep the OSS community as technical is it is, but for heaven's sake, learn to communicate with your audience. I'm absolutely sure that you'll then be able to actually sell OS software. Probably not the application itself, but support. At least, that's what counts for businesses, support as guarantee for continuity.

    7. Re:Nice to see more openness. by po8 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "There are countless applications where you'd barely be able to scrape together a living if it were OSS."

      Exactly. Welcome to the competitive marketplace, which is finally returning to software after a long dry spell of monopoly. The OSS folks will be unable to make a living on these "countless" apps, and so will closed-source vendors; arbitrage will drive the price users are willing to pay toward zero. App vendors in niche markets better get used to the idea, because it's already starting to get here. If your business plan doesn't include producing software that a lot of folks want badly, and that involves substantial effort to produce, you have a bad business plan in 2005. Find a different one. Whether your plan directly involves open source or not is somewhat irrelevant to either of these points.

  2. No Games Yet? by soda160289 · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Even with XGL I still dont think many game developrs will jump to linux now. Since Xorg is just now matching some frame rates with windows.

  3. Unfree by Brandybuck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used.

    What good is Open Source if it's inextricably tied to proprietary software? Where do I send my money to get someone to write a Free Software video driver?

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    1. Re:Unfree by Ruie · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Two things you can do (in no particular order):
      • Ask (politely) ATI to provide 3d specs
      • Work on DRI project (r300 driver for example)
    2. Re:Unfree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > Where do I send my money to get someone to write a Free Software video driver?

      I don't know, and I wish there was one too, but:

      I think people generally misunderstand the sheer amount of work put into those proprietary graphics drivers. It's not something where you can throw a few bucks at some garage coders and turn out the same thing. These are done by large teams of highly payed developers (I think 100 developers is the right order of magnitude, plus or minus), working for years. It takes *serious* amounts of money to fund that sort of development staff, and it's not something you and me and a few other likeminded folks are going to be able to fund.

      Can you get *some* working graphics driver for a lot less money? Of course. But you can't get what the proprietary drivers do, in terms of performance and functionality, on the cheap.

      Just tryin' to inject some reality into the picture here :D

    3. Re:Unfree by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How much money do you have? Because you're gonna have to buy the IP of a LOT of companies in order to open source their stuff. Lots of proprietary stuff in the chips and the drivers, from what I hear.

      That's the same tired old line we've been hearing since the days before XFree86, when it was just X386. And you know what? It's all bullshit.

      All the cards through-out the years that vendors have kept proprietary, they all eventually received 3rd party open-source drivers and you don't hear a word about those 3rd parties being sued or otherwise harassed for violating anyone's IP. All it took was time and effort for people to reverse engineer the proprietary ms-windows drivers.

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    4. Re:Unfree by Lussarn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It takes *serious* amounts of money to fund that sort of development staff, and it's not something you and me and a few other likeminded folks are going to be able to fund.

      You are talking about a different issue. When he said he wanted a free software driver he did not said the developers working on it shouldn't be payed. Nvidia and ATI can throw 1000 paid developers on the problem for all I care and still develop a Free software driver.

      Nvidia would still sell the hardware even if the driver where Free software. What good is the driver without the hardware?

      Now, you would maybe say Nvidia can't open source the driver because they don't own all of it. I say bullshit, If there is a will there is a way. The will just isn't there today, but the future might change that.

    5. Re:Unfree by BobFunk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't know, and I wish there was one too, but: I think people generally misunderstand the sheer amount of work put into those professional operating systems. It's not something where you can throw a few bucks at some garage coders and turn out the same thing. These are done by large teams of highly payed developers (I think 100 developers is the right order of magnitude, plus or minus), working for years. It takes *serious* amounts of money to fund that sort of development staff, and it's not something you and me and a few other likeminded folks are going to be able to fund. Can you get *some* working operating system for a lot less money? Of course. But you can't get what the proprietary operating systems do, in terms of performance and functionality, on the cheap. Just tryin' to inject some reality into the picture here ;)

  4. Another reason to care ... by JoeBuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .. is that future video cards might well be 3D-only, and the old 2D interfaces that X relies on won't be available. You'll have cards designed pretty tightly around the OpenGL spec and related specs, and if you don't have a way to do X with such a beast, forget using the card with Linux.

  5. Reality check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    R100 was released in Summer 2000
    R200 was released in Summer 2001
    R300 was released in Summer 2002

    We are now living in 2006 and you saying that opensource drivers work in SOME cases and are fast in SOME cases...

    "The simple fact is that the very thing you're saying is impossible - opensource developement of top-quality drivers - has already happened."

    Ok, let's put in that way: opensource developement of top-quality drivers is impossible within a reasonable timeframe (before the hardware becomes obsolete).

    Currently ATIs best chip is R520, which uses vastly different architecture than R300. During this year ATI will release R600 which will use unified shader architecture, which is again completely different. I'm 100% sure that we won't have even half-decent opensource drivers for R520 before R600 becomes available.

  6. But OpenGL is nearly crippled by the X protocol. by master_p · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The greatest use of accelerated 3d graphics would be the independence of the GUI display from the physical screen resolution without loss of detail (resolution permitting, of course). But the X protocol is pixel-based, and therefore OpenGL is almost useless. Windows can be treated like textures, but GUIs would be much better if they were vector-based.