XOrg Foundation Opens Membership and Elections 197
XOrg Foundation writes "To active developers and users of the X Window System:You are invited to join and help shape the direction of the new X.Org Foundation. Membership in the X.Org Foundation is now open and free.Applications for membership are sought from all contributors to the X and Desktop communities." Read more below for the rest of the information from the foundation.
The Interim Board of directors has established that examples of acceptable
contributions that will qualify you for membership in the Foundation include
coding, bug-fixing, testing, design, documentation, translation,
administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, speaking at
conferences, and supporting bugzilla or release management.
Should you wish to apply for free membership in the X.Org Foundation, then
please visit:
http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html
All Members are eligible for election to the Board of Directors and the
Architecture Group of the XOrg Foundation. The XOrg Foundation is now
seeking nominations for candidates for election to these groups.
Nominations for each election are open until 23.59 PDT on Friday 30th April
2004 for those Members of the X.Org Foundation who wish to stand for
election. You may nominate yourself for election. You may not nominate any
other member.
There will be 8 people elected to each of the Board of Directors and the
Architecture Group. In this first year of the X.Org Foundation, the four
candidates polling the most votes in each election will be granted a two
year term of office (until June 2006), and the next four candidates will
receive 1 year term of office (until June 2005). In subsequent years, four
seats of each group will be re-elected in the annual elections.
It is permissible for a candidate to stand for election for both the Board
of Directors and the Architecture Group.
The responsibilities of an elected person are detailed in the current
Bylaws of the X.Org Foundation, which can be found at:
http://www.x.org/XOrg_ByLaws_17Sep03.pdf
In addition, an elected person will be required to attend the annual
meeting of the X.Org Foundation, which will be held a location determined
in advance by the Board of Directors.
Should you wish to enter your candidacy for these elections, then please
prepare a personal statement of up to 200 words that can be provided to
prospective voters. This statement, and the statement of contribution to
the X.Org Foundation (which you completed when applying for membership)
will be made available to all voters to help them make their voting
decisions.
Once you have completed your personal statement, then you may visit:
http://www.x.org/member/XOrg_Foundation_Election_N omination.tpl
to enter your candidacy for the X.Org Foundation elections.
We look forward to your membership and candidacy submissions,
The Interim Board
X.Org Foundation."
Re:Rant time!! (Score:5, Informative)
>network bandwidth) every time I obscure it with a window or hop to
>another virtual desktop??? The damned thing is already wasting traffic
>updating when I'm not even lookin g at it, why does it need to redraw
>AGAIN when I view the window again???? Now onto my final gripe for
>right now.
Toolkit problem. Don't blame that on X.
>Gripe 3: If X is such a truly network independent application why the
>hell can't I simply redirect the output of an already running process
>to any X-term???
Cause ther's a lot of state residing on the X server about every
application/Xwindow. And there is no current way of transferring
that state to another X server.
Re:I hope they solve (Score:2, Informative)
Second, there are scripts floating around that will automatically rebuild the nvidia kernel module for your current kernel if it fails to load. I have been using such a script in Gentoo for a few months now. Works fine and I never have to do anything after installing a new kernel.
Re:GPL? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
This is informative? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rant time!! (Score:5, Informative)
You can easily do this if you use screen. I do it all the time.
http://www.guckes.net/screen/
Use it like this:
user@host:~$ screen -S longcompile
user@host:~$ make
Now press ctrl-a then d to detach.
Close all your terms and go home.
Now ssh back into the machine and type screen -R longcompile to reconnect to your compile session. You can detach and reattach as often as you like. It also has a lot more features, but I'll let you RTM for those.
Re:This is informative? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, they recently changed to something resembling the old BSD license, including an advertising clause, which makes it not compatible with the GPL. That's the licensing tiff. However this came after the original split between the groups, where some people walked away from the Xfree86 project because of other issues - problems getting changes commited, folks that hadn't developed in years still having developer status while folks that were major current contributors couldn't get it, and had to go through a huge rigamarole to get bug fixes posted and the like. So it was really the combination of the two different issues that brought the current situation about - the first group that split were fortuitously positioned to pick things up when the license change drove the second group to leave and the Linux Distro-makers decided they didn't want anything to do with the new Xfree86.
This isn't actually true. You can distribute non-free software on the same disk with free, that's not the problem at all.
The problem is that you can't link the code. If your GPL program needs to link against some of the new Xfree code, then you have a legal problem because of the licenses being incompatible. In most cases that's probably not necessary, but in the cases where it is it's a huge problem, and while shipping the new Xfree86 in a distro would not necessarily be a legal problem (particularly since the new license affects only the new code,) it would still be opening the door to huge problems later on, and that's why no one wants to touch the thing. Hopefully the fact that this license change has just dropped Xfree86 from being the defacto standard X11 implementation to being a historical footnote overnight will act as a warning to anyone else that might be considering the same course of action.
The Xfree86 project still seems to be in denial about this, btw, as a quick browse of their website will show, but the fact remains - no one is using their new version, no one will touch it with a ten foot pole, and their developers are hemmoraging like crazy.
Re:Rant time!! (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I think there is a case for allowing vector graphics in X - it would make fonts easier to define, for example. Low-level voxel support would be nice, too, for when people play with 3D.
There's also a case for modifying the X font server to support metafonts.
The sample implementation needs a few speedups, too - it's OK but could include accelerated cases. I've also had lots of problems running binaries compiled from their sources. Too many quirks.
Aside from these minor irritants, X as it stands is a very good system.
Re:More infighting? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the GPL is not no-strings. No strings would be public domain. GPL is more like 1 string -- if you release it, provide source. Depending on your philosophy and whether or not you agree with the GNU Manifesto, that's either a whisper-thin thread or a big thick rope that weighs you down.
Re:Forks (Score:4, Informative)
Please stop your fud.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
Sure, we're all interested in openness and transparency, which is why we're working so hard to see it all happen. But this isn't about a single person, or gripes about a single project; it's about achieving the end goal of X's world domination (and self-improvement) as best we can.
Re:Rant time!! (Score:2, Informative)
You want a backing store for the windows. Try using the +bs option to the X server, as in