Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 06:50:47PM -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote: 
> The X.org executive committee has been discussing ways to deal with the
> interlocking problems of lack of public participation and the slow speed
> of standards development, and are preparing a proposal to recast the
> organization to improve these areas.  David Dawes has been part of this
> work, as the XFree86 rep on the executive committee, and changes in the
> X.org & XFree86 relationship are included as well.  I've just spoken with
> the X.org Chairman, who is working on writing up the various discussions
> into a semi-formal proposal, and once that's done (should be within the next
> few weeks) he'll be sending a message to this mailing list with more details.

IMHO, one thing X.org should do if it wants to reimagine itself is
expand to include toolkit/desktop level concerns and establish
contacts with toolkit and desktop developers. X should really be
developed to meet the needs of the UI, not the other way around.  That
goes from the top down: user -> apps -> desktop -> toolkit -> X -> OS.

Is X.org only about X protocol? Or is it about X-based technology
defined broadly?

http://www.freedesktop.org/ needs a way to formalize specifications.
The Free Standards Group has expressed interest in doing this, and
displayed understanding of why it's important, but X.org hasn't.

It isn't obvious to me that the open source community is compatible
with all possible standards processes, though. An IETF sort of model
may be most appropriate.

Havoc