Re: 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.

> 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

> International; a bunch of desktop-like things -> Motif vs Open Look -> CDE
> "unification") repeat itself yet again in the form of myriad distributions
> and GNOME vs KDE.

GNOME/KDE unification is a solved problem. And btw - all the customers I
deal with want at least _two_ choices. They've met the monoculture, it 
screwed them, and they want choice.

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

Alan