Adding desktop compositioning won't break existing X servers or introduce a X.org dependency. Because the new stuff is all implemented as X server extensions the availability of Xdamage, Composite, etc. can be (and is) checked at runtime. If found, great, metacity will function as the compositioning manager. If not, it's business as usual.
However, the next version number has not yet been decided upon. Some argue that 3.0 is reserved for when the API needs to be broken. I personally think a 3.0 is waranted if there's significant new features and that API versioning is not so important, i.e. version numbers are for end users not developers.
Getting all the new cool stuff like compositioning working will be a major focus of GNOME 2.10, to be released in March 2005.
That's one of the benefits of GNOME's rapid 6 month release cycles. At the beginning of this year nobody could have seriously expected all of this cool development happening with X.org or predicted the demise of XFree86. Already we have compositioning in CVS, but 6 months from now GNOME will be ready to take full advantage of it as we now make it a priority for the next release. The extension itself will also have some time to stabilize in X.org.
We're also seeing some very nice timetable coordination between X.org, GNOME, and Fedora Core as all projects move to shorter mutually supporting cycles, resulting in new cool stuff getting to end users faster than previously.
Yep. By default when you enter something in the url bar that is not a site it will do a "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google.
If you don't want this and prefer to get the full Google results instead, open the url about:config. Type "keyword.URL" into the filter box, and change the value to "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q =" (there's no space in there, Slashdot inserts it). That should do the trick. You can of course change the url to be whatever search engine you prefer.
Another neat trick is setting up keywords. By creating a bookmark and adding a keyword to it, the %s part of a bookmark will be replaced with whatever is in the url bar at the moment. That way you can set up custom searches for IMDB, Google Groups, Google News, Wikipedia, etc. After that, searching Wikipedia as an example is as easy as entering "w sometopic" in the url bar. I've got a whole slew of keywords for doing online translations between different languages, dictionary lookups etc.
I think that's just stupid, there's no excuse for not including this "account" by default. There's not even anything you can configure in the Add Account step, you've just got to confirm it.
On the other hand they still include crap like "Local Folders", even though there's a million dupes in Bugzilla with pleas to get rid of it. I mean what the heck are you even supposed to do with those? The only reason they can't be removed, as explained to me by a developer, is because Thunderbird depends on them for many background tasks even if you never store a single message in them. Nice job of separating the backend from the interface there...
Though I bitch, I still love Thunderbird. The UI is getting a bit bloated though (I mean do you really need a Javascript console in a mail application, what a waste of a menu entry position)
- The favicons are now stored in the bookmarks file. Previously if the browser crashed the favicons would disappear (as they were stored in the browser cache), not so anymore. This also means that with a little editing you can assign custom favicons to sites that don't usually have an icon. - Favicons no longer get assigned to the wrong bookmarks.
It seems to be working fine for me with the new versions. Thunderbird 0.8 asked me if it was to be set as the default mail application, I said yes and now mailto: links open up in Thunderbird. It supposedly uses the GNOME "preferred applications" framework, so your mileage may vary under other desktops.
Links from Thunderbird open up in Firefox 1.0PR just fine too. Previously there was all sorts of problems, for me it only worked once and after that the damn profile manager dialog would pop up. But it all seems to be sorted out now.
Man I can't wait for the autotooled X.org releases sometime in the future (debrix or whatever the branch name is called).
Building this beast is a trip down memory lane to the bad old days. Half way trough it bombs out on me because it can't find bison (now there's a program I haven't yet needed this century). So you install the program and continue on with "make World". What follows is the longest "clean" operation I've ever seen. Forget about just picking up compiling where it left. You're better of deleting the whole tree and unpacking the sources again, trust me, you'll save time.
Imake was a piece of shit when it was new and unsuprisingly it still holds true in 2004. However if it wasn't for X.org and Freedesktop I bet we'd still be compiling XFree86 5.0 with this pos a few years from now, at least someone at X.org is working on moving to the autotools for the next release.
Here's some extensions I like that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Magpie. Those who've used FlashGet with IE will love this little thing. It'll snatch all the files pointed to by links from a page according to some pattern, for example *jpg, and save them to disk or open them up as tabs. Great for collecting "nature pictures".
Firefox's bookmark dialog's "Create in" feature pisses me off. It never, ever, has the folders you need in it's puny little drop down. OpenBook removes it and replaces it with the full bookmarks folder tree.
You can reorder tabs with MiniT using simple drag and drop on the tab bar. I think this should maybe be added to Firefox itself, it's pretty basic functionality.
Take any one subject you know really really well. Look up some news articles on it in the papers, on Google News etc. You'll likely find that the news reporter gets things wrong about as often as he gets them right. Now extrapolate that to the rest of the news, to the subjects you do not know so in depth. Right...
Everything you read, be it on the Internet, in the newspapers, books etc. contains factual errors, mistakes by sloppiness and bias in many forms.
Wikipedia doesn't claim to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It's a springboard into any subject, giving you a quick overview and perhaps some links to take you further. Encyclopedias can't be used as references for anything beyond grade school anyway, so why hold wikipedia to a higher standard? What it is however, is completely fascinating and the closest thing to a real hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy we're likely to get. Just don't take it too seriously.
I always for example grab the "regular" tar.gz version of the kernel for two reasons,
1) I always forget the j option to tar, since bz2 packages are not that common. It should autodetect it. 2) I have the perception that the combined download time and unpacking is longer for bz2
Point two was subjective up until now, but just for the hell of it I decided to measure it. I used the time command to measure how long it took to download the kernels and how long it took to unpack them:
time to download linux-2.6.8.tar.bz2 1m4.414s
time to download linux-2.6.8.tar.gz 1m9.706s
time to unpack linux-2.6.8.tar.bz2 2m05.457s
time to unpack linux-2.6.8.tar.gz 0m26.309s
This is on a P4C 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 8Mbit connection. So there you have it, with a fast enough connection the difference is significantly in favor of the old gz format. The size difference between the bz2 and gz kernel, about 8.8 MB, is not nearly good enough to merit the slower unpacking. If you have a slower machine but also a slower connection the result is likely in the same ballpark.
This goes to show that if you want to provide faster (subjective) update times to users, especially in the future with faster connections, you have to study the problem in detail and not just blindly try to optimize some aspect of the process (size in this case) since the global performance might in fact perform worse. Premature optimization and all that... What's the time for patching using delta compression any way? If a 600KB RPM update can be delta compressed to 10KB, but the patching process takes longer than 15 seconds, I'm likely see a slow down in system update time.
Instead of still supporting crap like XFree86 4.1 they need make sure their driver installs without incident on the most used Linux distributions at present time. That means that at least on Fedora Core, SuSE and Mandrake it should be as easy as running "sh ati-installer.run" (like the Nvidia installer). There's no second step to that procedure, just restarting X. Also how hard could it be to provide some AMD64 builds? Who cares if nobody uses them, the lack itself reflects poorly on the company when compared to Nvidia.
The fglrxconfig utility is a joke, asking you everything from your keymap to mouse model. It's a fundamentally flawed concept. They need to swallow their pride, study the Nvidia installer and replicate it exactly.
I have cards from both manufacturers, the most recent one being an ATI. However, if this situation doesn't change I know what my next card and my recommendation to others will be.
Neither have opened up their drivers. The difference is that Nvidia's installer works really well and ATI's is a piece of crap. I'm using a Radeon 9600 Pro on Fedora Core 2, I've decided to stick with the default X.org radeon driver because it's such a hassle to get the vendor driver to work on FC2.
If you decide to just use the default driver it works well enough with xv overlays etc. except of course there's no 3D acceleration. The open source nvidia driver is exactly the same.
Someone needs to do to OpenOffice what Firefox did to Mozilla.
Slim the program down. Get some artists, UI persons and marketers on board to work on the interface and the public image. The OpenOffice.org website is styled exactly like Mozilla.org in 2000, it doesn't make me want to try out their software.
Contrast this with the clean new Mozilla.org and their spotlight on the new flagship product Firefox. Click the huge Download button Mozilla.org and the download starts, OpenOffice.org wastes my 15 seconds of attention already on the front page. Back in the browser history I, and Joe User, go. I'll return in a few years to see if OO.o has gone anywhere, but Joe might not.
I feel your pain, not only is it ugly, it shows a lack of imagination. No doubt someone will reply that GNOME does it too. Not so! GNOME has really progressed on this front in just a few years. There's really no mainstream g* applications left that the user needs to be aware of, except maybe gaim and the gimp.
A modern GNOME desktop is now build around the following components
Mailer: Evolution
Browser: Epiphany or Firefox
Office suite: Open Office
File manager: Nautilus
Music player: Rhythmbox
Media player: Totem
Firewall: Firestarter
CD burning: Coaster
Vector drawing: Inkscape
IDE: MonoDevelop or Eclipse
Archiving: File-roller
IRC: x-chat etc.
All nice unique names. If you see gSomething in a menu, file a bug so we can get rid of it!
The Linux microcode update service overrides the BIOS on this issue too (as well as BIOS functions in general), since it runs in the normal Linux startup sequence i.e. it always overwrites the BIOS applied microcode. Even if the Linux supplied microde is older than the BIOS's it might be advantageous to "downgrade" since the distribution toolchain might only be certified for a particular microcode revision.
I'm not sure if other Linux distributions do this already, but at least Fedora Core 1 and 2 both come with a processor microcode update service that runs in the bootup sequence. It's even enabled by default out of the box.
Linux has for a long time already mostly ignored the system BIOS since they're notoriously broken because of legacy reasons. Supplying known good microcode is simply another step in eliminating variables that make system testing needlessly complex, I predict we'll see more developments along these lines in general.
Eclipse is great, but no thanks to Sun. IBM went ahead and developed their own native widget because it was painfully obvious to everyone with eyes in their heads that both AWT and Swing were crap. Sun's been bitching and moaning ever since and they still don't get it.
With the exception of Eclipse and Azureus (both using SWT) Java on the desktop has been an abysmal failure. If it was up to Sun it would have been dead and buried a long time ago. There are however a few things that could revive the Java desktop platform:
1. Open Source Java, allowing it to be distributed with Linux.
2. Allowing bundling of the JRE with end user applications, you just can't expect users to download it themselves. If you believe that you just haven't spent enough time with end users.
3. Be ready to make some hard decisions or watch Java rot from the inside. What the hell is up with the ridiculous "generics" implementation, now we're stuck with this autocasting-lite crap for the foreseeable future because Sun didn't want to modify the VM even a little. Very shortsighted of them.
However Sun won't do it, because there's no profit in it for them. However that's nothing new, it seems like everyone else is making money with Java except for Sun. I predict that in a few years IBM will be the defacto Java driver.
...a new, enterprise-class replication system for PostgreSQL called Slony-I
PostgreSQL is good from a technical point of view, but they could use someone with some very basic PR and marketing skills on their team. A new website and better documentation wouldn't hurt either.
There's the Fedora Legacy project that backports security fixes for RH9 and in the future also for old Fedora Core releases. There's already some testing packages for RH9 available in Bugzilla, once they're approved they'll be up on the RH9 advisories page. You should use yum to download and install the new packages, it's all explained on the website.
Yeah it's still not fixed, but when an updated package is available it will still most likely simply be versioned 1.2.5-r8. You can keep a watch on the package and see immediately when it's fixed here.
Fedora Core 1 and 2 already have backported security updates for this as 1.2.5-7 and 1.2.5-8 respectively since yesterday. Much better than having to install a release candidate.
I think many (most?) good Open Source projects are run by benevolent dictators. Linus is certainly one, Ben Goodyear says what goes when it comes to Firefox with great success so far but also attracting a lot of criticism because the browser doesn't support some pet feature or the theme changed or whatever. Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD is practically infamous, but it seems to be working for him. Alexandre Olivia pretty much singlehandedly decided that Nautilus is going spatial, and he did most of the work too as the maintainer.
As long as the dictator produces results the majority will continue to support him. There's always going to be hurt feelings and flame wars, but dictators give the project focus and discipline. And as we've seen with David Dawes and the now dead XFree86 project, if the leader goes bad, because of the Open Source license we can simply work around the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Adding desktop compositioning won't break existing X servers or introduce a X.org dependency. Because the new stuff is all implemented as X server extensions the availability of Xdamage, Composite, etc. can be (and is) checked at runtime. If found, great, metacity will function as the compositioning manager. If not, it's business as usual.
However, the next version number has not yet been decided upon. Some argue that 3.0 is reserved for when the API needs to be broken. I personally think a 3.0 is waranted if there's significant new features and that API versioning is not so important, i.e. version numbers are for end users not developers.
Getting all the new cool stuff like compositioning working will be a major focus of GNOME 2.10, to be released in March 2005.
That's one of the benefits of GNOME's rapid 6 month release cycles. At the beginning of this year nobody could have seriously expected all of this cool development happening with X.org or predicted the demise of XFree86. Already we have compositioning in CVS, but 6 months from now GNOME will be ready to take full advantage of it as we now make it a priority for the next release. The extension itself will also have some time to stabilize in X.org.
We're also seeing some very nice timetable coordination between X.org, GNOME, and Fedora Core as all projects move to shorter mutually supporting cycles, resulting in new cool stuff getting to end users faster than previously.
To add to this, to really get most out of the feature use following keyboard shortcuts:
/ (slash): Starts the find as you type feature, if you haven't enabled it to be active all the time in the options.
' (apostrophe): Starts find as you type, but only searches links. This is incredibly useful for very fast keyboard browsing.
control-g: Highlight and jump to the next match.
Yep. By default when you enter something in the url bar that is not a site it will do a "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google.
q =" (there's no space in there, Slashdot inserts it). That should do the trick. You can of course change the url to be whatever search engine you prefer.
If you don't want this and prefer to get the full Google results instead, open the url about:config. Type "keyword.URL" into the filter box, and change the value to "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&
Another neat trick is setting up keywords. By creating a bookmark and adding a keyword to it, the %s part of a bookmark will be replaced with whatever is in the url bar at the moment. That way you can set up custom searches for IMDB, Google Groups, Google News, Wikipedia, etc. After that, searching Wikipedia as an example is as easy as entering "w sometopic" in the url bar. I've got a whole slew of keywords for doing online translations between different languages, dictionary lookups etc.
You've got add it yourself. Choose Tools->Account settings->Add Account->RSS News & Blogs.
I think that's just stupid, there's no excuse for not including this "account" by default. There's not even anything you can configure in the Add Account step, you've just got to confirm it.
On the other hand they still include crap like "Local Folders", even though there's a million dupes in Bugzilla with pleas to get rid of it. I mean what the heck are you even supposed to do with those? The only reason they can't be removed, as explained to me by a developer, is because Thunderbird depends on them for many background tasks even if you never store a single message in them. Nice job of separating the backend from the interface there...
Though I bitch, I still love Thunderbird. The UI is getting a bit bloated though (I mean do you really need a Javascript console in a mail application, what a waste of a menu entry position)
They seem to be fixed in 1.0PR:
- The favicons are now stored in the bookmarks file. Previously if the browser crashed the favicons would disappear (as they were stored in the browser cache), not so anymore. This also means that with a little editing you can assign custom favicons to sites that don't usually have an icon.
- Favicons no longer get assigned to the wrong bookmarks.
That fixes about all the issues I had with them.
It seems to be working fine for me with the new versions. Thunderbird 0.8 asked me if it was to be set as the default mail application, I said yes and now mailto: links open up in Thunderbird. It supposedly uses the GNOME "preferred applications" framework, so your mileage may vary under other desktops.
Links from Thunderbird open up in Firefox 1.0PR just fine too. Previously there was all sorts of problems, for me it only worked once and after that the damn profile manager dialog would pop up. But it all seems to be sorted out now.
There's been some changes since that build, one xdamage fix in particular that's probably worthwhile. Otherwise it's mostly documentation changes.
New Fedora (S)RPMs should be available soon.
Man I can't wait for the autotooled X.org releases sometime in the future (debrix or whatever the branch name is called).
Building this beast is a trip down memory lane to the bad old days. Half way trough it bombs out on me because it can't find bison (now there's a program I haven't yet needed this century). So you install the program and continue on with "make World". What follows is the longest "clean" operation I've ever seen. Forget about just picking up compiling where it left. You're better of deleting the whole tree and unpacking the sources again, trust me, you'll save time.
Imake was a piece of shit when it was new and unsuprisingly it still holds true in 2004. However if it wasn't for X.org and Freedesktop I bet we'd still be compiling XFree86 5.0 with this pos a few years from now, at least someone at X.org is working on moving to the autotools for the next release.
Here's some extensions I like that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Magpie. Those who've used FlashGet with IE will love this little thing. It'll snatch all the files pointed to by links from a page according to some pattern, for example *jpg, and save them to disk or open them up as tabs. Great for collecting "nature pictures".
Firefox's bookmark dialog's "Create in" feature pisses me off. It never, ever, has the folders you need in it's puny little drop down. OpenBook removes it and replaces it with the full bookmarks folder tree.
You can reorder tabs with MiniT using simple drag and drop on the tab bar. I think this should maybe be added to Firefox itself, it's pretty basic functionality.
Take any one subject you know really really well. Look up some news articles on it in the papers, on Google News etc. You'll likely find that the news reporter gets things wrong about as often as he gets them right. Now extrapolate that to the rest of the news, to the subjects you do not know so in depth. Right...
Everything you read, be it on the Internet, in the newspapers, books etc. contains factual errors, mistakes by sloppiness and bias in many forms.
Wikipedia doesn't claim to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It's a springboard into any subject, giving you a quick overview and perhaps some links to take you further. Encyclopedias can't be used as references for anything beyond grade school anyway, so why hold wikipedia to a higher standard? What it is however, is completely fascinating and the closest thing to a real hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy we're likely to get. Just don't take it too seriously.
I always for example grab the "regular" tar.gz version of the kernel for two reasons,
1) I always forget the j option to tar, since bz2 packages are not that common. It should autodetect it.
2) I have the perception that the combined download time and unpacking is longer for bz2
Point two was subjective up until now, but just for the hell of it I decided to measure it. I used the time command to measure how long it took to download the kernels and how long it took to unpack them:
time to download linux-2.6.8.tar.bz2 1m4.414s
time to download linux-2.6.8.tar.gz 1m9.706s
time to unpack linux-2.6.8.tar.bz2 2m05.457s
time to unpack linux-2.6.8.tar.gz 0m26.309s
This is on a P4C 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 8Mbit connection. So there you have it, with a fast enough connection the difference is significantly in favor of the old gz format. The size difference between the bz2 and gz kernel, about 8.8 MB, is not nearly good enough to merit the slower unpacking. If you have a slower machine but also a slower connection the result is likely in the same ballpark.
This goes to show that if you want to provide faster (subjective) update times to users, especially in the future with faster connections, you have to study the problem in detail and not just blindly try to optimize some aspect of the process (size in this case) since the global performance might in fact perform worse. Premature optimization and all that... What's the time for patching using delta compression any way? If a 600KB RPM update can be delta compressed to 10KB, but the patching process takes longer than 15 seconds, I'm likely see a slow down in system update time.
It's most certainly an ATI problem.
Instead of still supporting crap like XFree86 4.1 they need make sure their driver installs without incident on the most used Linux distributions at present time. That means that at least on Fedora Core, SuSE and Mandrake it should be as easy as running "sh ati-installer.run" (like the Nvidia installer). There's no second step to that procedure, just restarting X. Also how hard could it be to provide some AMD64 builds? Who cares if nobody uses them, the lack itself reflects poorly on the company when compared to Nvidia.
The fglrxconfig utility is a joke, asking you everything from your keymap to mouse model. It's a fundamentally flawed concept. They need to swallow their pride, study the Nvidia installer and replicate it exactly.
I have cards from both manufacturers, the most recent one being an ATI. However, if this situation doesn't change I know what my next card and my recommendation to others will be.
The open source drivers work fine with the R3xx cards (9600-9800) these days. They're not the latest models anymore, but probably the most used ones.
Neither have opened up their drivers. The difference is that Nvidia's installer works really well and ATI's is a piece of crap. I'm using a Radeon 9600 Pro on Fedora Core 2, I've decided to stick with the default X.org radeon driver because it's such a hassle to get the vendor driver to work on FC2.
If you decide to just use the default driver it works well enough with xv overlays etc. except of course there's no 3D acceleration. The open source nvidia driver is exactly the same.
Someone needs to do to OpenOffice what Firefox did to Mozilla.
Slim the program down. Get some artists, UI persons and marketers on board to work on the interface and the public image. The OpenOffice.org website is styled exactly like Mozilla.org in 2000, it doesn't make me want to try out their software.
Contrast this with the clean new Mozilla.org and their spotlight on the new flagship product Firefox. Click the huge Download button Mozilla.org and the download starts, OpenOffice.org wastes my 15 seconds of attention already on the front page. Back in the browser history I, and Joe User, go. I'll return in a few years to see if OO.o has gone anywhere, but Joe might not.
I feel your pain, not only is it ugly, it shows a lack of imagination. No doubt someone will reply that GNOME does it too. Not so! GNOME has really progressed on this front in just a few years. There's really no mainstream g* applications left that the user needs to be aware of, except maybe gaim and the gimp.
A modern GNOME desktop is now build around the following components
Mailer: Evolution
Browser: Epiphany or Firefox
Office suite: Open Office
File manager: Nautilus
Music player: Rhythmbox
Media player: Totem
Firewall: Firestarter
CD burning: Coaster
Vector drawing: Inkscape
IDE: MonoDevelop or Eclipse
Archiving: File-roller
IRC: x-chat
etc.
All nice unique names. If you see gSomething in a menu, file a bug so we can get rid of it!
The Linux microcode update service overrides the BIOS on this issue too (as well as BIOS functions in general), since it runs in the normal Linux startup sequence i.e. it always overwrites the BIOS applied microcode. Even if the Linux supplied microde is older than the BIOS's it might be advantageous to "downgrade" since the distribution toolchain might only be certified for a particular microcode revision.
I'm not sure if other Linux distributions do this already, but at least Fedora Core 1 and 2 both come with a processor microcode update service that runs in the bootup sequence. It's even enabled by default out of the box.
Linux has for a long time already mostly ignored the system BIOS since they're notoriously broken because of legacy reasons. Supplying known good microcode is simply another step in eliminating variables that make system testing needlessly complex, I predict we'll see more developments along these lines in general.
Eclipse is great, but no thanks to Sun. IBM went ahead and developed their own native widget because it was painfully obvious to everyone with eyes in their heads that both AWT and Swing were crap. Sun's been bitching and moaning ever since and they still don't get it.
With the exception of Eclipse and Azureus (both using SWT) Java on the desktop has been an abysmal failure. If it was up to Sun it would have been dead and buried a long time ago. There are however a few things that could revive the Java desktop platform:
1. Open Source Java, allowing it to be distributed with Linux.
2. Allowing bundling of the JRE with end user applications, you just can't expect users to download it themselves. If you believe that you just haven't spent enough time with end users.
3. Be ready to make some hard decisions or watch Java rot from the inside. What the hell is up with the ridiculous "generics" implementation, now we're stuck with this autocasting-lite crap for the foreseeable future because Sun didn't want to modify the VM even a little. Very shortsighted of them.
However Sun won't do it, because there's no profit in it for them. However that's nothing new, it seems like everyone else is making money with Java except for Sun. I predict that in a few years IBM will be the defacto Java driver.
There's the Fedora Legacy project that backports security fixes for RH9 and in the future also for old Fedora Core releases. There's already some testing packages for RH9 available in Bugzilla, once they're approved they'll be up on the RH9 advisories page. You should use yum to download and install the new packages, it's all explained on the website.
Yeah it's still not fixed, but when an updated package is available it will still most likely simply be versioned 1.2.5-r8. You can keep a watch on the package and see immediately when it's fixed here.
Fedora Core 1 and 2 already have backported security updates for this as 1.2.5-7 and 1.2.5-8 respectively since yesterday. Much better than having to install a release candidate.
I think many (most?) good Open Source projects are run by benevolent dictators. Linus is certainly one, Ben Goodyear says what goes when it comes to Firefox with great success so far but also attracting a lot of criticism because the browser doesn't support some pet feature or the theme changed or whatever. Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD is practically infamous, but it seems to be working for him. Alexandre Olivia pretty much singlehandedly decided that Nautilus is going spatial, and he did most of the work too as the maintainer.
As long as the dictator produces results the majority will continue to support him. There's always going to be hurt feelings and flame wars, but dictators give the project focus and discipline. And as we've seen with David Dawes and the now dead XFree86 project, if the leader goes bad, because of the Open Source license we can simply work around the problem.