XFree86 Core Team Disbands

mumumu was among the many to write with this news: "XFree86's release engineer David Dawes has announced that "a majority of the XFree86 core team has voted in favour of my proposal to disband the core team". XFree86's News Headline has a short message about it. Why, all of a sudden? What is the successor of the XFree86? Xouvert? freedesktop.org?"

Just a formal thing.

[Qbertino]

This has nothing to do with XFree developement. In fact the non-relation between XFree 'core team' and Xfree development was the actual reason to dispand.

Full text of email & analysis.

[Noryungi]

Here is the email:

I'm very pleased to announce that a majority of the XFree86 core team
has voted in favour of my proposal to disband the core team.

I believe that this is an acknowlegement that the core team was no longer
representative of the active, experienced and skilled XFree86 developers,
or a place where technical discussion happens.

Happy New Year to all!

David
--
David Dawes
developer/release engineer The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes

So, this means that XFree86 is not disbanding, simply that the core group has recognized it was not really needed anymore.

That is a relief, as I almost thought for a second that XFree86 was going to disappear... *eek*

Don't overreact

[Carnifex487]

Read the message:

I believe that this is an acknowlegement that the core team was no longer representative of the active, experienced and skilled XFree86 developers, or a place where technical discussion happens.

In effect, nothing is going to change. There are still active, experienced and skilled XFree86 developers out there, who will continue to work just as they always have.

So Keith won?

[eddy]

Wasn't this what Keith Packard [xwin.org] et.al wanted [slashdot.org]?

Re:Bumpy times ahead for XFree86 users?

[Lussarn]

Maybe you should understand what we are talking about here before you predict anything.

The XFree86 core team (of which some of them isn't even *nix users anymore) have been disbanded because of there lack of interest in the project. It's really no big deal for XFree.

Re:Slashdot trolling?

[labradort]

I suggested this item as well. There is very little imformation about it. If all you read was the one line at xfree86.org, you might wonder what it meant as well:

Core Team Disbands

[30 December 2003]

The XFree86 core team voted to disband itself, effective 31 December 2003.

That is all they wrote!!!!

Putting out this news to get more information is not trolling!!!

BTW, xfree86.org's website is now slashdoted.

Re:Why a successor?

[AndyElf]

Of course it is -- anyone claiming this to be the end of fxree simply don't understand the difference b/w "core team" and "developmetn team" -- the former is like a board of directors, if you wish, while the latter is what makes or breaks the project.

Re:Core Team Disbands

[Nothinman]

From what I've seen it appears they were slowing development more than steering it anyway, do you have any idea how many patches the Debian X package maintainers had to maintain because the X team was so slow at accepting patches?

Re:Why a successor?

[smkndrkn]

possibley because:

Not everyone knows what a core team is in relation to this project

Given the above some may want a little reassurance that this isn't a major problem and that development will continue

Considering how ambiguous the release was, to most people, a little news on how this affects the direction of the project couldn't hurt anyone could it?

Re:No. We won.

[rsidd]

To give you an idea of how WRONG was that, David Dawes (one of the founders) stated in the public mailing lists that he thinks X-Window is the past, and that a Windows-like graphics infrastructure (he's now a windows user, btw) is the future.

I think you're thinking of David Wexelblat [dwex.org].

Re:"Core Team" models need to die.

[lemox]

I've had problems with random screen corruption (that was not always alleviated with a "reset") with both Radeon and Voodoo cards while using the framebuffer.

Re:Why a successor?

[ArsonSmith]

I wouldn't even say "significantly better" if someone came up with something that did everything X does and even one or two more things I'd probably switch. I just use a lot of features of X11 and use several of the advanced features of xfree86. but if another project could do it better I have no real brand loyalty.

Re:When open source dies?

[JamesKPolk]

gcc.

gcc was dormant, Cygnus picked it up and forked off egcs.

egcs is now known as gcc 3.

This is only good news for Xfree86

[Error27]

Back in the day Xfree86 needed to be a corporation to trademark the term "Xfree86" so they created this weird organization with a constitution and everything. There was the board and there was the core. Later another group was added, people who had commit access to the CVS repository, but weren't on the core. Then at the bottom there were regular developers.

The problem is that no one really new what the core does except that it had a private email list. Even people on the core didn't know. (I'm not making this up).

Historically XFree86 has had closed developement. If you wanted to read the developers emails or look at the development code you had to apply and be approved. A couple years ago they openned up the CVS repository to the world. Then earlier this year they openned up all the development email lists.

But once in a while when during code discussions people would say, "Oh that. We discussed on the core email list and we decided it sucked. Case closed." That kind of thing gets annoying.

Some people said that the core email list should be destroyed, but the answer was that, "Why do you care? All the development discussion is on the developers email list." This was probably true in theory if not in real life.

To be on the core you had to be selected after coding for 3 or 4 years. It's not worth it really because as I said, no one knows what the core does and all the real power is held by the people with CVS commit access anyway.

The whole idea of a core group was stupid and pointless. The reason it stuck around for so long was that XFree86 developers are stubborn people. Everyone (often not developers) was telling them to change and have elections and so they said, "Screw you. We'll do whatever we want." Another reason was that some people on the core group weren't active developers and didn't follow the lists closely. They didn't realise how frustrated people were.

I've been getting more and more upset as I write this post thinking about how XFree86 used to be, but I started out just wanting to say that it was a good thing. I believe it is a good thing for XFree86. It's a sign that the project is becoming more transparent and responsive to developers. It takes humility on the part of the core members to give up the extra privileges.

This is a good thing for everyone.

Don't know why people don't do any research

[MazTaim]

If anybody was honestly curius about what this meant, you might have checked the mail archives of the devel list. Here [mail-archive.com] is a more detailed message from David Dawes. 'Nuff said.

Re:Core Team Disbands

[Fnkmaster]

The thing is XFree86 ALSO has a Board of Directors. The Core Team was like a Board of Directors, only they didn't do anything but add bureaucracy and private list discussion of issues that would then be cited as authority for decisions made. These are the fuckers that attacked Keith Packard for being "low class" because he set off to work on X outside of the XFree86 organization because they simply couldn't adopt their bureaucracy to accept innovative new patches and extensions to X.

Keith for those of you who don't know, wrote the Xft/XRender extensions that do anti-aliased font rendering and is generally the leading force pushing X (kicking and screaming, I might add) into the 21st century. The Core Team was one of the leading forces doing the kicking and screaming, next to the Board of Directors. I would be happy to see them go to, replaced by a more forward thinking, less bureaucracy-minded group of leaders.

Re:No. We won.

[theantix]

From here [dwex.org] and here [dwex.org]:
"XFree86 I helped create it, along with David Dawes, Jim Tsillas, and Glenn Lai. I haven't done any work on XFree86 in about five years, but I'm still on the Core Team, and on the Board of Directors, and I kibitz a lot. " and "...but I'm a Windows user, not an Open Source user (hence why this page is built with FrontPage)"

Whoa Keanu... that link you posted clears up the news release for me quite a bit. I can forgive anyone for choosing to run Windows if they need/prefer to... everyone has different values and goals. But if a core team member has disavowed Open Source altogether and builds his simple website in Windows and Frontpage... perhaps a shakeup of the core team was more required than an outsider like myself could ever guess.

Re:Is that why...

[be-fan]

You say X doesn't suck, but then explain how it doesn't fully utilize graphics cards.
-----
X doesn't not fully utilize graphics cards because it can't, but because manufacturers don't make optimized graphics drivers for it. If you use vendor-written ones like NVIDIA's, you'll see what X can really do given quality drivers. With proper drivers, X's drawing performance is easily comparable to the GDI's, an for stuff like bit-blits, it attains performance that you can only get in the GDI by using DirectX.

X doesn't work. I hate dragging a simple window and have a trail of tutti-fruity after it,
-----
Are you using GNOME by any chance? Because I never have that problem in KDE. In fact, KDE behaves better than WinXP in this respect, because I do see expose lag in Windows sometimes. I'm running 3.1.4 on a P4 2GHz with NVIDIA drivers.

or waiting 5 seconds for a menu to popup.
-----
I've never had to wait 5 seconds for a menu to pop up. If you're seeing that, there is something wrong with your configuraton. Anyway, X has nothing to do with how long it takes a menu to pop up. X is just the drawing layer. As a drawing layer, it is quite fast. But even if it was slow, it still wouldn't take long to draw a menu, which is basically just a color fill and some bit-blits. If your menus are drawing slowly, it's because your application is taking its sweet time responding to input events. GNOME has problems with this. It won't load icons until the first time they are actually used. That means when you open a menu for the first time in a given app, you can see each icon being drawn as they are loaded one at a time from disk! Again, this is a problem with the app, not X.

Here's the part where you blame the window manager, or the graphics library, or the desktop environment.
-----
Well, X *is* the graphics library, and it's fast, which is all you can really ask of a graphics library. So it *is* the fault of the window manager or DE. On my machine, KDE is about as fast as WinXP (except for some apps that haven't been well optimized for display performance, like Konqueror), while GNOME, Mozilla, and OpenOffice are dog-slow. If they both are using the same X, why does KDE run fast while the others don't? Start up Qt designer and abuse the UI. Try resizing with the resize bump in the corner. Try moving windows over it. Qt Designer has a complex UI with lots of widgets. But it performs just as fast as the best Windows apps. That's why X can't be the problem! Maybe its X's fault for not making it easier to write fast apps, but that's different from saying that X is slow.

Hold on while we hack on yet another "extension,"
-------
Let me guess. You're not a programmer, right? An extension is not a "hack." An extension is a way of extending a codebase to support a feature that was not concieved when it was originally written. An extension is a clean way to extend a codebase's functionality while preserving compatibility. A hack is entirely different.

and then meanwhile in a Microsoft discussion complain that you can't hack on things that weren't in the core design of Windows.
----
Because Windows wasn't designed to be extendible. X was designed from the beginning to be extendible. Thus, new features were added on cleanly. Windows wasn't, and thus new features were sometimes hacks.

X-Windows is here to stay.

[master_p]

I don't understand why people want to ditch X-Windows. The X-Windows system is a fine window system. It's not slow, it's extendable, it's networkable, and it runs in every Unix system/clone.

The problem lies with the layers above xlib: the toolkits. Actually, not the toolkits themselves, but how they are used. For example, the Linux GUIs suffer from bad fonts and bad font sizes, bad placement of text, bad placement of buttons, too much info on the screen, improper colors, and usability issues like cut-copy-paste etc.

To those that they request a new window system based on accelerated 3d graphics, I have to say this: it does not fit with the Unix mentality. Unix can run in minimal hardware. I can run TWM on a 486 and the machine will just fly. But if a new window system comes along that is based on new 3d accelerators, lots of old systems will be left out...and not forget other unix systems that might not have 3d acceleration at all. And the truly impressive effects that Quartz can achieve are just eye-candy...most professionals will turn them off anyway.

Re:Bringing it into the 20th century?

[be-fan]

The only thing OS X has, technically, is the machinery necessary to support transparency and window shadows.

It does *not* have OpenGL-accelerated drawing, and the very rich applications that it enables.

I'm sick of debunking Quartz "Extreme". OS X just uses OpenGL to accelerate compositing. Go read Apple's SIGGRAPH presentation on Quartz "Extreme" (page 18, as I remember) to see that the CPU actually draws the Quartz 2D graphics.

Re:Why a successor?

[Billly Gates]

Technically a new solution is needed. Not just politically. XFree86 sucks goatballs! X not as much. You do not know how bad you all really have it. I hate Xfree86 with a passion.

X can run on pda's. Can Xf86? I think not. Hell Xf86 takes about 70 megs of ram while the competitors take 4-8???

Why are driver support for video, dri, and opengl a decade behind Windows and 15 years behind MacOS?

Truetype fonts were just recently ports 2 years ago for crying out loud. Hello this is not 1983 everyone.

What about running XF86 on that old 486sx with 8 megs of ram lying around?

We need a new X that is written from scratch, that does not need cryptic vidtune apps to properly display your monitor, makes writing drivers for easy, has GDI or postscrip graphics support for printing, integrated sound, and fast opengl graphics that does not have to go through hoops that slow it down. DRI was an attempt at this but it only works under Linux and sucks for FreeBSD.

Its unflexible if you ask any developer and poorly written with things like loops unrolled to make them execute faster, etc. Xourvert was started from the same guy who wrote the xft font server. The core team and the technology slowed him down and it was very hard and slow to get anything done.

If you want more information on XF86 go read the Unix Haters manual. They describle working with Xlib, as trying to make a bookcase out of mashed potatoes. Its a very funny read.