an observation from the sidelines

I've used X and UNIX at home since the early 1990 but have never had the 
interest to deal with GUI issues.   From where I sit on the side lines 
it seems what we have is a major failure to communicate and Keith 
certainly seems to be at the center of it,  although I don't think he is 
alone in this.  From what I've read the last 2 days, we've got a few 
groups that seem disconnected,   X.org,  Xfree86,  and the (GNOME/KDE) 
desktops building on the software and standards provided by both. 
X.org seems to be only commercially focused,  the fact that XFree needed 
to incorporate to participate seems like a bad joke these days.   If 
X.org wants to be relavent, it needs to stay in closer touch with the 
volunteer efforts, least X get totally forked and they become 
irrelavent.   The XFree86 team seems like they can learn from some of 
the other free software projects,  and the fact that this list was 
started and that they have started using Bugzilla seems to indicate that 
they are interested in doing that,  but then Keith may have lit this 
fire.   I like the discussion going on here,  it's been needed for a 
long time.   There has been major changes in who is pushing advancements 
in UNIX/Linux/X technology since the time that XFree86 was started and 
the organizations involved need to recognize that.   I hope that a fork 
of XFree86 is NOT necessary,  but change is.   I think that having the 
committers vote on new committers and show an interest in growing the 
development effort is certainly a good start.   Not to be critical,  but 
   the people that are doing active development should control the 
direction of an open source project,  not people that are not active but 
were at sometime in the past.


Jim Doherty