A Look at the Compiz and Beryl Merger

invisibastard writes to mention that Linux Tech Daily has an editorial on the merger between Compiz and Beryl. "This state of affairs was a shame. Something that was finally getting the general public excited about Linux, the 3D desktop, was wasting time with duplication of effort and fighting. There were concerns about the long term viability of Beryl. The perception in the community overall was, Compiz = old and stale, Beryl = fresh and exciting. This despite the feeling in the Compiz community that the "real work" was being done by David Reveman and Compiz, and there were exciting things with Compiz core (like input redirection, etc...) on the horizon."

Comments

The war between Compiz and Beryl was productive

[g2devi]

Contrary to what is claimed, the war between Compiz and Beryl was productive. It did three things:
1) Forced David and friends to restructure his development process to be more like Beryl's
2) Forced Quinn and friends to realize that maybe David was right on some issues
3) Allowed Beryl to experiment with alternative ways of developing Compiz without destroying Compiz's approach.

Okay, maybe the conflict was a bit less civilized that than it could have been, but sometimes you need a good fight to raise the issues and so you can look for ways to solve them. You can't fix what you won't even acknowledge. The approach taken before the split up was disfunctional and didn't give people what they wanted. It's likely the new approach will be a lot better since it'll allow David to focus on what he's best at and Quinn to focus on what he's best at without stepping on each other's feet.