Re: history, vision, and politics

David Dawes wrote:
> Maybe the
> vendor members will be inspired to Open Source their entire proprietary
> X source trees too, given how strongly they seem to feel about how
> X technology should be licensed.  

I can't speak for any of the other vendors (and technically, not even
for Sun - I'm an engineer, not a spokesman or VP, so as always when I
send out mail on these lists, it's my view of the world, which may or
may not be the same as the official Sun view), but while we cannot open
source the entire Solaris Xsun source tree, we have been working for
several years now to open source the bits we can that we feel are useful to
others - this has been both in big strokes, such as the I18N code that
went into X11R6.6 & XFree86 4.3, the IPv6 code for X11R6.7 & XFree86 4.4,
and the STSF project still under development, and small bits and pieces,
such as a number of bug fixes you can find listed by my name or the names
of other Sun X engineers in the changelogs & bugzillas of XFree86 & X.Org.

> The X.Org foundation may be set up to not look like a vendor
> consortium on the surface, but it is still reliant primarily on the
> traditional vendors for its funding model.

The big difference between the X.Org Foundation and previous incarnations
here is that the new foundation is not reliant on a funding model to survive.
Like most open source projects, support is needed from somewhere for hosting
websites and CVS and the like, but that support seems to always find a way to
be provided for any project used by enough people.  Unlike the previous
consortiums, the bug database, CVS trees, etc. are open to anyone who wishes
to continue to work on them and lack of funding won't keep people from being
able to keep the projects alive.  There are useful things the foundation can
do with funding, much like the GNOME Foundation finds useful ways to spend the
funding it gets from it's sponsors and fundraising - but neither X.Org nor GNOME
will die simply because their Foundations run out of money.   (Though their
foundations running out of money may be a sign that so few people use the
technology any more to continue to sustain it.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering