[forum] A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 09:12:57PM +0100, Egbert Eich wrote: 
>  >     * Lack of cooperation with other projects
>  > 
>  >       The KDE and Gnome projects were forced to form the freedesktop.org
>  >       project to extend and enhance X Window System standards because
>  >       XFree86 refused even to participate in the process.
> 
> Now just for my curiosity:
> 
> On which occasion has XFree86 refused to participate in this 
> process?
> Maybe some of the UI people here can help me out? 
> As we also want to hear critizism this should be openly discussed
> here.
> 

I'm not sure exactly what's meant here. I don't remember an email
exchange like "will you work with freedesktop.org?" "hell no!" ;-)

I do think that freedesktop.org and other kinds of X enhancements
should live in the same organization, ideally, but I don't know that
anyone has actively tried to make that happen or keep it from
happening.

It's more that the desktop/toolkit projects have assumed that X.org is
hopeless and XFree86 isn't interested. Either of those assumptions may
be wrong.

The bottom line is that common initiatives to improve our GUI should
all be under a big shared umbrella, and it'd be nice to figure out how
to create that umbrella. At the moment there's some stuff that falls
through the cracks between existing organizations (GNOME, KDE,
XFree86, X.org). freedesktop.org tries to mop up some of that, but
really you can think of freedesktop.org as an emergency patch more
than a correct structural solution.

Take a concrete problem: we have this huge stack of ICCCM
extensions/clarifications. Should those be merged into the ICCCM or in
some way "blessed"? Who would do that and how?

Havoc