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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."

5 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: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)
  3. 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

  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.