Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
X GUI Operating Systems Software Unix

XOrg Foundation Opens Membership and Elections 197

Posted by Hemos from the come-join-up dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

XOrg Foundation Opens Membership and Elections More

XOrg Foundation Opens Membership and Elections

Comments Filter:

  • I registered, (Score:3, Funny)

    by nevek ( 196925 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:07AM (#8903842) Homepage
    Nevek For Governor!!

    Whats an xwindows system?

  • great for pickup factor (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:10AM (#8903870)
    well helllloooo ladies, I'm a member of X.org...

  • What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why must we have elections, and official positions? Just open source it, and let the community decide what's best for the project.

  • X.org election sponsored by Diebold E-Voting (Score:4, Funny)

    by norculf ( 146473 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:10AM (#8903878) Journal
    Seriously I hope they have a more reliable system than that.

  • Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mtenhagen ( 450608 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:11AM (#8903885) Homepage
    Does anyone know why they are doing this?

    Whas the organisation failing apart and they are desperate for new members?
    Or are they financially healthy and want to grow bigger this way?
    • Because more members and contributors means faster development of the X window system?

      Come on, isn't this common sense?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by vossman77 ( 300689 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:39AM (#8904135) Homepage
      My understanding is that Keith Packard (had guy right now) had griefs over the approx. lifetime membership in the xfree86 project. The xfree86 blocked new developers from coming on and kept old uninterested developers onteh staff. Keith wanted the whole system to be more open and that is why he forked. This is his method for the new system.

      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

        by fooishbar ( 743147 )
        The X.Org Foundation is not run by keithp; he is not even on the interim board. The reformation of X.Org is a process which has been going for quite some time now.

        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. :) d, X hanger-on

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

      by KingOfBLASH ( 620432 )
      There were some articles about this on /. [google.com]. Basically, the guy in charge of the XFree86 project decided to change the license terms from GPL to something which was very inconvinient for most distros. Up until this point, X.org was just a discussion group of "What should we do with XFree86"? Because XFree86 was now non free, they forked the project when it was last under the GPL, and now are looking for members to develop the newest incarnation of the X window system.

      • This is informative? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:10AM (#8904493) Homepage
        Uh, XFree86 has never been GPLed or LGPLed. It's under an MIT/X11 license variant since it's inception- I know, I had to license code modifications to the Utah-GLX source base under that license. What transpired was that the guy in charge of the XFree86 project changed the license to more of a BSD-ish license that requires advertising, etc. This made the newly licensed version incompatible on a licensing level with any GPLed OS- you can use it, you just can't distribute the new version of XFree86 with a Linux distribution without the prospects of possible legal hassles, etc.

        • Re:This is informative? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Arker ( 91948 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:47AM (#8904953) Homepage

          What transpired was that the guy in charge of the XFree86 project changed the license to more of a BSD-ish license that requires advertising, etc.

          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 made the newly licensed version incompatible on a licensing level with any GPLed OS- you can use it, you just can't distribute the new version of XFree86 with a Linux distribution without the prospects of possible legal hassles, etc.

          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.

          • Sorry, I know it's screwey to reply to yourself, but looking over their website some more they look to be even deeper in denial than I thought over this, and I don't see any better place to post this than here.

            The Xfree86 homepage [xfree86.org] proudly trumpts the following:

            4.4.0 now Stable After tremendous testing and community feedback, the 4.4.0 Release is now available for twenty (yep that's the number 20!) popular platforms. Distros that have integrated it are: NetBSD, Slackware Linux, Conectiva, and many others

            • The "slackware-current" version of Slackware right now has the 4.4.0 version in the official "X" section, but recently the X.org version was made available (in the 'testing' section) as an alternative. I suspect that X.org may supplant the XFree86 4.4.0 version before the next 'official' slackware release.

              Not that I've noticed - I've been compiling X out of the DRI [sourceforge.net] cvs tree to get DRI for my laptop's ProSavage/DDR video - I'm honestly not sure whether they're working from X.org or XFree86.org or what, but

              • The "slackware-current" version of Slackware right now has the 4.4.0 version in the official "X" section, but recently the X.org version was made available (in the 'testing' section) as an alternative. I suspect that X.org may supplant the XFree86 4.4.0 version before the next 'official' slackware release.

                Heh, ok, but from what they said on the website you'd expect it was in the latest release (9.1,) not the unstable testing tree. As long as it stays there and doesn't make it into an official release the

            • For NetBSD: HEADS UP: XFree86 4.4.0 imported [netbsd.org]

              In regards to linking, I believe the new license is only on non-library code. This from the license FAQ on their site:

              "To avoid issues with application programs such as KDE and GNOME and other X-based applications, that are licensed under the GPL, the 1.1 licence is not being applied to client side libraries."

              • For NetBSD: HEADS UP: XFree86 4.4.0 imported

                Hmm, so like slack, it's available in a development branch only. Hardly what I would have expected from the words "Distros that have integrated it."

                In regards to linking, I believe the new license is only on non-library code.

                Quite true (although if I'm not mistaken that's the case only because when confronted on the issue they tried to back down off the original plan to avoid trouble?) and the license change isn't that huge a deal for that reason IMOP. At t

                • Hmm, so like slack, it's available in a development branch only. Hardly what I would have expected from the words "Distros that have integrated it."

                  That is what I call integration. By default, future NetBSD has v4.4. The BSD's do not like to pull big switches in software just before a release regardless of license issues.

                  I wonder if you can link to the new code dynamically just like I can link to LGPL dynamically without changing whatever license I choose.

                  • I wonder if you can link to the new code dynamically just like I can link to LGPL dynamically without changing whatever license I choose.

                    That's one of those areas of copyright law that there are different opinions on, but IIRC the opinion of the FSF counsel is a qualified no. The qualification being that if the code you're linking is sufficiently generalised that there are other libraries it could link to just as well then there's no question of 'derivative works' and so that would be ok (like it's ok to

  • This reminds me of a Nigerian scam email (Score:3, Funny)

    by Slashdot Hivemind ( 763065 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:11AM (#8903887)
    I think it's the personal addressing and the crap formatting. Are all the modalities assured in this risk free venture?

  • Forks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Aren't there quite a few forks of XFree86 at this point? Shouldn't we be worried about fragmentation? How can you develop for Linux if you now have to worry about the graphic subsystem as well?

    (First Post?!?)

  • I claim the position of XOrg Fuhrer (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The first thing I plan to do is to cleanse the codebase of all bad code. A good programmatic cleansing from time to time helps refresh the CVS tree of liberty.

  • Cool.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by sokkalf ( 542999 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:13AM (#8903907) Homepage
    Do you get a fancy @x.org mailaddress?

  • XF86.Org.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:17AM (#8903940)
    Interesting way to go tell XF86.Org to go pound sand.. First release their old licensed code, then demonstrate how much more open your board of directors is... I think I like it..
    • Same here. Now to figure out how to get in the door! :) Translating into Klingon or Elvish seems out of the question (dictionary isn't big enough) and they probably have enough people applying to bug-fix!

  • I hope they solve (Score:4, Interesting)

    by UltimaGuy ( 745333 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:17AM (#8903947) Homepage
    the myriad of problems users of GUI in Linux face. I mean, common, it surely pisses me if I have to edit a config file by hand if I install any nvidia driver. Also, I hate to do it again when I recompile a new kernel.
    Also, I hope they provide a solid backdrop from where desktop linux can emerge.

    • Only Nvidia can solve that, (Score:5, Interesting)

      by anti-NAT ( 709310 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:37AM (#8904120) Homepage

      by openning up their hardware programming specifications.

      I have none of the problems you mention, and that is because my video card has open programming specifications.

      • which card do you use? I'd like to support that company

        • I'm using a Matrox G550. I know, not the latest greatest 3D card, then again, I don't play games, and don't care to compete with the FPS figures of other people. Of course, there are uses for 3D graphics other than games.

          If you want get a video card that has open source drivers, have a look at the list of video cards supported by the XFree86 [xfree86.org]/Xwin [x.org] project, and the DRI project [sf.net].

          Last time I looked, the ATI 9200 series of cards where the latest supported with fully open DRI drivers. Again, not the latest and

    • Well for one, you don't have to edit the config file if you are only rebuilding the nvidia kernel modules.

      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.
      • First, you have to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and change the driver from nv to nvidia as well as check and make sure the proper modules are loading to install the nvidia drivers as well as run their installer from the command line (which makes no sense to me, why on earth couldn't you do this from the gui and set a line in the script to load the module on next login.

        This would let you simply ctrl+alt+backspace rather than init 3, kill the processes that didn't terminate properly, run the installer, init 5 to
    • Is it an nVidia problem, or a problem with your Linux distribution?

      On FreeBSD:

      cd /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver ; make clean install

      Usually FreeBSD tends to be more "manual" than Linux, while Linux tends to be more pointy-and-clicky. I'm surprised they don't have the nVidia driver thing polished to be mindless. :(

    • Re:I hope they solve (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't know why you think an improved X will solve Linux's "Gui problems"?

      " it surely pisses me if I have to edit a config file by hand if I install any nvidia driver. "

      So blame Nvidia. Why doesn't their install routine do this? Come on now we are not talking about rocket science here. Parsing a text file and changing a few lines is something ANY first year CS student can figure out why can't Nvidia?

      "Also, I hope they provide a solid backdrop from where desktop linux can emerge."

      The Linux desktop isn't
    • What would you like to see the X folks do about the nvidia driver problems?

      Ideally, nvidia would release specs to their cards so support can be added into x.org and the kernel and then detection and setup can be integrated into the system install process.

      Honestly, I don't see any other sensible way.

      Why not take your concerns to Nvidia and see if they can help?
    • Given you can have -any- resolution (and not just the fixed set Windows gives you), it's going to be tough not having a config file you need to edit. I suppose you could have a GUI tool which had slider bars and could continuously update the screen resolution, but it could be nasty on the monitor.

  • GPL? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Will this remain GPL? The X.org website has a lot of talk about benefits of corporate membership, and says they will periodically release software to the general public free of charge. I though X.org was a GPL alternative to Xfree86 after the much discussed liscense change.

    • Re:GPL? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Weird O'Puns ( 749505 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:42AM (#8904177)
      Xorg isn't licensed GPL but with the old XFree license(v.1.0) that is GPL compatible. The big discussion was because the latest XFree license(v.1.1) holds a clause that makes it incompatible with GPL, which then might produce massive problems with anything linked to it. This isn't yet a problem as the XFree's xlib is still using the old license, but people fear it might be in the future.

      • Re:GPL? (Score:2, Troll)

        by runderwo ( 609077 )

        The big discussion was because the latest XFree license(v.1.1) holds a clause that makes it incompatible with GPL, which then might produce massive problems with anything linked to it.

        It only produces "massive problems" in the FSF's interpretation of the GPL. I don't share their interpretation of dynamic linking as creating a derived work, and without that interpretation, there is no problem writing dynamically linked applications with the new license.

        It's very similar to SCO's claim that writing your code

        • Yeah, I'm a troll. I went against the hive mind opinion on the GPL. Can I remain a Slashdot reader if I promise to repent?

  • Corp. Involvement? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:21AM (#8903971)
    Anyone know if NVidia or ATI is going to be involved with this? Sure would be nice to have stable drivers for 3d acceleration from the get-go...

    • Why would they? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Jason Hood ( 721277 )
      They sell graphics cards. They dont care if linux/X or MS succeeds. It makes no difference for them. They would probably prefer one OS existed so that they only have to write drivers for one platform.

      I bet they just wait it out and continue to support xfree86. There is no reason for them to act. In that respect, this is a setback to linux/X. Uncertainty has not been a good environment for technology investments since the dotcom bust. How many people buy their high end cards for windows as opposed to Mac or

      • Re:Why would they? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by kundor ( 757951 )
        Xfree86 and X.org are compatible. The current nvidia and ati drivers work fine on both. There is no need for them to change anything.

      • Re:Why would they? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tiger99 ( 725715 )
        I don't know about ATI, but the Nvidia driver seems to contain a large block which is common to Windoze, Linux (and maybe BSD?), and another part which is GPLed and is the kernel interface, produced as a normal loadable module. Frankly, I don't care what happens inside the proprietary bit, if they want to keep it that way, that is their right, although it may be silly. If it helps them to quickly write one driver which works with any OS, that is good.

        It would not actually help a competitor if they did revea

    • The XFree86 drivers work perfectly with the current X.Org server. Since at the moment it's basically XFree86 4.4rc2, it's almost completely compatible with the xfree 4.3 drivers. So we have stable 3D accelerated drivers from the get-go. Whether they update the drivers if/when XOrg's driver interface changes is another matter.

  • KDE/Gnome controlled X.Org? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tahtalim ( 735164 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:24AM (#8903997)
    Great... Whoever has more developpers can easily control X.Org. Donno if this is good or bad, but at least it won't be company oriented after all.
    • Considering the prior situation in XFree86 was that developers themselves had very little overall control - I think, you know, actually giving developers (including those that happen to work for companies) some say in the project they are working on might be a good thing, huh?

  • I nominate (Score:1, Funny)

    by KingKire64 ( 321470 )
    Bill Gates, after all look at all the wonderful stuff he hs done for windows. its so perty.

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Close