XGL Development Opens Up

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."

Comments

Nice to see more openness.

[jZnat]

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.

Re:Nice to see more openness.

[heatdeath]

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.

Re:Nice to see more openness.

[Kjella]

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...

Re:Nice to see more openness.

[Bert64]

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.

Unfree

[Brandybuck]

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?

Re:Unfree

[Ruie]

Two things you can do (in no particular order):

• Ask (politely) ATI to provide 3d specs
• Work on DRI project (r300 driver for example)

Re:Unfree

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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

Re:Unfree

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Unfree

[Lussarn]

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.

Another reason to care ...

[JoeBuck]

.. 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.