Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

[Just to be clear in what follows, I'm simply an engineer on Sun's X11 team.
  I'm not an official spokesman, and I'm speaking based on my knowledge & beliefs
  which are not necessarily either the gospel truth or Sun's official position.]

G O Economou wrote:
> I think you are hampered because it looks like X.org/Sunw are too closely
> tied and too 'closed'.

Officially, Sun is simply another X.org member, on equal footing with HP and
the other executive members.  Unofficially, we do have a fair amount of
influence, due both to having a Sun employee serve as X.org Chairperson for the
last couple of years, and to having a larger number of people actively working
in it than most other members. We believe it still serves an important role, and
we have a bit more resources to spend on it than some of the vendors who have
cutback their Unix desktop groups. It's not been as effective as it could be at
fulfilling that role, and we've been part of the call for reform to open it up
more.

> I think you don't make a case for the value you could add
> because you don't want to give proprietary secrets away.  

We haven't been running around tooting our own horn, but I don't think we're
trying to hold back that many secrets either.  For example, we've been open for
the last year about the STSF development and our plans for it, although we have
gotten a bit bogged down in the actual development and haven't done as good a
job as we needed to in keeping our sourceforge site up to date so people could
see that.

We've also been slowly increasing our interaction with XFree86, and intend to
keep doing so, both as a user of the technology and as a contributer to it.
Even before last year's announcement of the Sun Linux desktop product, we had
been bringing XFree86 bits into the Solaris X server, such as the Render
extension and various bug fixes.  We're preparing IPv6 support for contribution
back to XFree86, and have been working with Sun's GNOME Accessibility engineers
to develop additional support for accessibility we plan to donate once it's
done.  We hope to eventually earn our place as recognized contributors to
XFree86 and valued members of the community, but understand we have to back
these plans up with actual code for this to happen.  (There is a fair bit of
Sun contributed code in XFree86 already, but that's all been filtered through
X.org so far, such as the I18N code we donated for X11R6.6.)

> But perhaps the cuts are too deep now and you don't have the staff...

We've been fortunate to be spared deep cuts, but our staff does suffer from the
burden of coming up with more projects we'd like to work on than we have time to
do.

> Well then you start throwing out ideas via X.org and get  the glorious open source
> world  to work and venture in them.

Perhaps.  There's one example of this already - dynamic resizing (of the root
window/virtual screen) has been on our wish list for a while, and I'm even a
member of an X.org Task Force which was setup to develop this, but the Task 
Force hasn't met in the last couple of years, and meanwhile RandR was developed
to fill this need.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-      [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering