Re: A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

Havoc Pennington wrote:

>On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 11:27:22AM -0500, David Wexelblat wrote: 
>  
>
>>Another avenue is say "to hell with X.Org, we'll do our own version of
>>ICCCM". To some extent, this is what has happened, right? Probably de-facto.
>>So who should take ownership of formalizing this? Should it be XFree86? The
>>desktop projects? LSB? I'm really not sure. Historically, it has NOT been
>>XFree86, but perhaps there is a perception that it has been, or a belief
>>that it should be.
>>    
>>
>
>FWIW, my view is that unless X.org drops the "if you pay, you get more
>say" process, the open source community should formally declare that
>X.org is irrelevant to us and we'll make our own standards. The
>standards body for the open source graphics infrastructure should be
>making decisions for technical reasons and technical reasons only, 
>and that means individual membership, not consortium.
>  
>
I generally loath  consortium generated software,  just look at the 
bloat-ware that was OSF (I still cringe everytime I have to work on a 
CDE desktop),   but the open source community needs it's software to 
work in a commercial UNIX (Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, Iris) environment and 
breaking off from this would be a very bad thing.    Maybe some of the 
effort being spent here should be re-directed to encourage better 
communication with X.org.

>None of us would accept "any company that pays gets to decide about
>{XFree86,Linux,GNOME,KDE}" and we should not accept that for new X
>specs either. And history shows that the consortium model is about 100
>times worse than the open source model for cross-company technology
>development.
>
>It would be nice to remove all ambiguity on this point.
>
>(I'm not even mentioning that the interesting X changes lately have
>come from outside X.org anyhow.)
>
>The question is of course who steps up to replace X.org; my opinion is
>that it should be XFree86, if XFree86 is willing to accept the
>obligation. I do think a more formal process/bylaws to ensure that
>everyone feels their voice is heard would be required for XFree86 to
>try to do standards. This could be somewhat organizationally separated
>from the implementation/code aspect of XFree86. Very unclear at this
>point how it would all look.
>
>Another (perhaps better) option is for X.org to change their process
>to a non-pay-for-play one, switch to be more IETF-like, etc. Perhaps
>X.org could even merge with XFree86. But this means they would lose
>their funding model, and so I don't see how they can do it. And we
>shouldn't wait forever for them to get around to it.
>
This sounds much better than anything else.   I agree that there needs 
to be better representation from people that are doing open source 
development into X.org.  There are a lot of groups that need to look at 
the open source model and see what they can learn from it.


Jim Doherty

>
>A final option would be to do an X.org replacement that was
>standards-only, separate from XFree86. But IMHO it makes more sense to
>have one-stop shopping.
>
>I feel bad for X.org employees, but the organization is holding us
>back right now by owning X standards on paper while not really being
>what we need.
>
>Havoc
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Forum mailing list
>[email protected]
>http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/forum
>
>
>  
>