[forum] (huge tangent away from) the removal of Packard

[David Wexelblat]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: forum-admin@XFree86.Org 
> [mailto:forum-admin@XFree86.Org] On Behalf Of Alan Cox
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 12:21 PM
> To: forum@XFree86.Org
> Subject: Re: [forum] the removal of Packard
> 
> 
> > I don't think there's any chance of Red Hat, HP, Dell, or other 
> > technology companies actually starting their own version of XFree86 
> > and doing anything successful. If these companies actually employed 
> > people to work on X and submit that work back to XFree86, 
> > the way they do for the kernel, their favorite desktop, databases, 
> > compilers, etc, we wouldn't be in this situation.
> 
> David, you have been out of touch with the project for years 
> and I'm afraid it shows. Red Hat contributed the working 
> Cyrix mediagx driver, four input drivers and various other 
> bits to XFree 4.3, Red Hat is working hard with at least one 
> major vendor unused to the open source world to get 
> support into the next XFree. Red Hat engineers work on 
> cleaning up DRI, getting it into the base kernels, chasing 
> corruptions and stopping vendors from quiting XFree work 
> because they are sick of the hassle of getting stuff into base XFree.
> 

I'll take your word for it. How much of that is Red Hat people, and how much
of it is Precision Insight->VA Linux->Red Hat people?

DRI isn't XFree86, FWIW.

> > device support (or so the theory goes). The card vendors can do it. 
> > Nvidia does it, and ATI does it, right? Yes, there is more 
> > work to do on ABI-type issues to make this work better, but the 
> > drivers are not built into the server binaries any more.
> 
> Technically yes, but the vendors want to be part of the main 
> tree, to work together and to avoid changes getting lost. 
> Thats why having seperate driver space maintainers and more 
> regular 'driverball' releases matters
> 

And this model is better why? They don't do things that way with Windows,
and I'll bet they prefer it that way. Not sure how it works with
Apple/MacOS. The point of the loadable server was so that XFree86 could get
out of the driver space and vendors could deal with their own drivers.

> If you don't believe in open source and free software why are 
> you still involved in XFree86 ?
> 

I believe strongly in Open Source, and not at all in Free Software (as
defined by the OSD and FSF, respectively). This has been my position for
pushing 20 years (from the first time I saw the GPL with Emacs v17, which
was almost 20 years ago, heaven forbid).

What makes me very sad is watching the exact same issues consume the Open
Source world as consumed the Closed Source UNIX world 15-20 years ago, and
which opened the door for Windows. I find the Red Hat vs United Linux
"noise" (CNet,ZDNet, etc) that exactly parallels OSF vs Unix International,
rather funny in a sad sort of way.

I'm a strong supporter of Open Source as a tool where it is appropriate. I
still hold Red Hat stock; I like Red Hat. I like Ximian. I like a few other
Open Source companies with interesting business models.

I personally don't have much interest left in hacking code; I don't code
much at work any more, and not at all in my free time. If I ever do, I will
do Open Source. Whether it will have anything to do with Linux or X, I don't
know; I doubt it. It will probably have something to do with my other
hobbies, and be Windows software.

BTW - You can blame Myst for me having gone over to the Dark Side. I built a
Windows box solely to be able to play Myst, and my wife started using it,
after years of ignoring my UNIX systems (including having X.Desktop and
WordPerfect for UNIX). She's a Chemical Engineer, works in biotech, damned
smart, and couldn't give a rat's ass about how the computer works - she just
wanted to do her stuff and Word on Windows 3.1 did what she needed, easily.
Opened my eyes in a big way about "desktop users".

Not to mention learning all the ins and outs of the 35+ million AOL users,
3+ million CompuServe users, 100+ million AIM users, 100+ million ICQ users,
etc, for the last 3 years. People working on Open Source desktop
environments/apps could learn a LOT from spending a few days in an AOL call
center...

> Alan

-- 
David Wexelblat, Chief Architect    mailto:DavidWexelblat@aol.com
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