-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday 10 April 2004 17:07, Philipp Thomas wrote:
Richard Bos
[Sat, 10 Apr 2004 20:50:34 +0200]: What's happening with Xfree? It's being updated to what 6.7.0???
Seems like the move from XFree86 4.4 prerelease to the X.org 6.7.0 release because of that unbelievably dumb advertising clause XFree86 added with 4.4 and which IMNSHO will ultimately lead to the death of the XFree86 project.
Philipp
Yep, that's pretty much my take on the situation as well. This was a hot topic on /. and my impression was that if XF86 doesn't change the license clauses that are giving many such adverse concerns that indeed the demise of XFree86 project is going to spin in and crash due to lack of interest. Keith Packard took a chance by trying to get the core team to open up to other needs and possibility and they booted him - so off to X.org he went. To be honest (flame protective suit on) the sort of poilitical infighting and wrangling I have heard about XF86's project managers reminds of the same sort of stories about the unrest in the certain BSD committees. It's not as if XF86 team could respond to some of the more placid and moderate requests from those outside of them - it's seems to boil down to power issues and egos. Pity - XF86 has provide some nice code that I as an end-user have been very happy to have access to. However, I myself, have desired more innovation related to the manner in which developers in other corners of the development world have mentioned. I refer to the section in "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook", Part 1: User Friendly? #7 The X-Windows Disaster. How to Make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC: <quote> If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which folled the same principles - but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. --Marcus J. Ranum Digital Equipment Corporation X Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, market hype, and just plain greed. X Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit on gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggrevated race conditions, and promulgated double standards. <end quote> And this opinion: <quote> X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (the idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the ONLY programs that ran under the windows system. Notice that none of these programs have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only as single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particlularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are areas in which modern X falls down? <end quote> The client (in X) is "the remote machine where the application is running", and the server is the local machine that displays output and accepts user input. Counterintuitive on most counts - since everywhere else in the IT world the "server" runs the app and the "client" is where user input and output is generally done. I really think this is why so many companies avoid Linux/'nix on the consumer end - it runs bass ackwards from a programmers sense. This also probably explains why Video drivers such as provided by nVidia and ATI can be so painful to use (especially ATI of late). On the upside, because of this, one might come to the opinion that nVidia and ATI (especially nVidia) do put a concerted effort to provide functional drivers (9it probably takes a lot more work to get functional than it should). It is my hope that X.org will be able to rectify some of these dificiencies - though to a degree XF86 has addressed these as well - but not to the degree that is could be and I believe that the political arena at XF86 is the primary reason that we are seeing this (excuse my bluntness) "Brain Dead" license clause that has the rest of the community up in arms. If SuSE/Novell back X.org (as well as others) I have a strong belief that the benefits to Linux/FOSS would be very substantial. <end diatribe> Cheers, Curtis. - -- Spammers Beware: Tresspassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again! Warning: Individuals throwing objects at the crocodiles will be asked to retrieve them! If pro is the opposite of con, then the opposite of progress must be congress! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAePOX7CQBg4DqqCwRAsGjAJ4vAGLjNrMN+MRMATCE0XuMypBWFwCbBBFU xrIcBU0qQy83iHg3ZvVa03I= =nL93 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----