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."
I registered, (Score:3, Funny)
Whats an xwindows system?
great for pickup factor (Score:5, Funny)
Would that make you on of the X men? (Score:3, Funny)
"Anonymo" or something?
Re:Would that make you on of the X men? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Would that make you on of the X men? (Score:2)
What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, it even works sometimes
Re:What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:3, Funny)
That depends, does the person with the most votes actually win this election?
Re:What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:2)
That's just absurd. What possible interest would George Bush Junior, who is apparently not a particularly 'technical' person, have in such an organization?
X is just the foundation upon which people do Window Manager Development, not some sort of military tool, right?...
Re:What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:2)
sarcasm [reference.com]
BUT BUT!!!! (Score:2)
I say we kill the opposition and take control my comrades!
Re:What ever happened to simple OS? (Score:2)
X.org election sponsored by Diebold E-Voting (Score:4, Funny)
Re:X.org election sponsored by Diebold E-Voting (Score:4, Funny)
Re:X.org election sponsored by Diebold E-Voting (Score:4, Funny)
At least it beats Diebold's system which appears to run on Majordumbass.
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whas the organisation failing apart and they are desperate for new members?
Or are they financially healthy and want to grow bigger this way?
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Come on, isn't this common sense?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
This is informative? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Speaking of denial (Score:3)
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:
Slackware (Score:2)
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
Re:Slackware (Score:2)
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
Re:Speaking of denial (Score:2)
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."
Re:Speaking of denial (Score:2)
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."
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
Re:Speaking of denial (Score:2)
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.
Re:Speaking of denial (Score:2)
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
Re:This is informative? (Score:2)
There definately is a conflict with the GPL. You cannot add any conditions to the license, the GPL prevents that. So a license which imposes conditions above and beyond what the GPL requires are GPL incompatible - you cannot legally combine code under the GPL with cod
This reminds me of a Nigerian scam email (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This reminds me of a Nigerian scam email (Score:3, Funny)
Forks (Score:2, Interesting)
(First Post?!?)
They are called... (Score:1)
Re:Forks (Score:2)
You _might_ want to worry about fragmentation in the driver space though, especially with all those binary-only drivers...
Re:Forks (Score:2)
Re:Forks (Score:4, Informative)
Please stop your fud.
I claim the position of XOrg Fuhrer (Score:2, Funny)
Cool.. (Score:5, Funny)
XF86.Org.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:XF86.Org.... (Score:2)
I hope they solve (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I hope they provide a solid backdrop from where desktop linux can emerge.
Only Nvidia can solve that, (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Only Nvidia can solve that, (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Only Nvidia can solve that, (Score:2)
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
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:I hope they solve (Score:2)
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
Re:I hope they solve (Score:2)
Find the process pretty simple myself, although it could be easier it's still the best binary driver I've seen a vendor release (in terms of install).
ATI, Asus, Promise, etc all release drivers that MIGHT work with your kernel/distro/etc Nvidia's driver allows the portion that dependent on these to be recompiled and so works 95% of the time rather than the 20% those other drivers achieve.
That said, changing runlevels is not something
Re:I hope they solve (Score:2)
On FreeBSD:
cd
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)
" 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
Re:I hope they solve (Score:2)
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?
Re:I hope they solve (Score:2)
GPL? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:GPL? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:GPL? (Score:2, Troll)
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
Re:GPL? (Score:2)
Corp. Involvement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they? (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Re:Why would they? (Score:3, Interesting)
It would not actually help a competitor if they did revea
Re:Corp. Involvement? (Score:2)
KDE/Gnome controlled X.Org? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:KDE/Gnome controlled X.Org? (Score:2)
I nominate (Score:1, Funny)
Haiku Breaks (Score:3, Funny)
the line breaks used in
t' f'ing a'ticle were
a bit excessive
-theGreater Hack-u.
Re:Haiku Breaks (Score:3, Funny)
Like storm-tossed forests,
cluttered and impsassable:
Those line breaks just suck.
Re:Haiku Breaks (Score:3, Funny)
My miserable attempt
theGreater HACK-u
As you can see I
Made no real attempt toward
Actual haiku.
Re:Haiku Breaks (Score:2)
(This is a translation. Don't expect it to retain the original syllable count)
Deprecate Haiku for Limerick [phenry.org] -- it has some good information about what a Haiku is supposed to be.
Re:Haiku Breaks (Score:4, Funny)
Trolls and dorks proliferate:
we must save haiku!
Joke Haiku is bad
Disrespectful and stupid:
just go kill yourself
You're missing the point
if you think that joke haiku is
not self-mocking
Banality is
used to mock austerity:
a glorious cause
You're right this is fun
I could go on forever:
you made a monster
Re:Great... (Score:2)
I guess the line breaks broke your concentration. You are only allowed to nominate yourself, and only if you're a contributor to X (as opposed to Y).
Re:More infighting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dragging up these kinds of conflicts as a problem with open source projects is a lousy excuse at best.
In the real world, if clients are "appalled by the infighting and bickering" what it really means is that they are appalled because they got to see what would otherwise to a large extent happen behind closed doors protected by ridiculous membership fees for industry consortiums, or they somehow see it as "infighting and bickering" when it happens on a mailing-list and serious, worthwhile competition when it happens in the form of press releases from large companies.
If your clients can't handle that, they need to learn - openness means dirty laundry IS aired in public, and ultimately it's a strength that allow users to take organizational risk into account when choosing a software solution, something which is inherently hard to do with companies where all the nasty stuff happens behind the users backs.
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
You obviously aren't paying attention. Most open source projects have one or a few people who control what happens. For instance the Linux Kernel has one man who says "It's going to be done THIS way" and that's Linux Torvalds. Alot of open source projects are similar. Therefore your entire argument is invalidated, to think you could have avoided posting if you knew what you were talking about.
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
Richard Stallman is a large part of why all of this great software exists for FREE and why we all have so much FREEDOM with regards to how we use and develop it.
No to mention of course that if your "CIO" friends aren't familiar with the conficts and "ego" involved with *any* product development (free software or proprietary), they must be highly sheltered indeed from the realities within their own organizations.
Perhaps you and your "clients" should go play elsewher
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
We don't need to have CIOs potentially exposed to
Any CIO that can't take exposure to zealots isn't a qualified CIO.
Any large sized internal IT organization has its share of zealots already that have to be dealt with.
Further, these are the same CIO's that have to withstand the sales droid talks "We Have One System That Will Solve All Your Problems".
Good CIOs have a Teflon-coated asbestos suit and knows enough to ask their objective technically-educated staff to evaluate any details that they don't unde
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
I once had to work with the idiot who became the CIO (after I left, thank God). Contrary to corporate security policy, he had his secretary (excuse me, Admin) log on to his email, print it out, and put it on his desk. He would read it and reply in longhand, and she would then log on to his email and type the replies -- sometimes the next day, some
Re:More infighting? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:More infighting? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In the real world, good-quality software comes with no strings attached."
Those 2 thing go together. "Free" as in freedom (as in GPL) gets you no-strings. The whole X fork happened because someone tried to add strings.
"In short, please work on developing good software. As long as it's free as in $0.00, I'll be happy."
This makes me want to call you all sort of nasty stuff. Why don't YOU go develop something I want and then give it to ME? I'll just sit here and bitch about your development process and complain if it isn't $0.00.
Or was your post supposed to be a joke and I missed it?
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
Joke? Try troll. Look who wrote it.
Re:More infighting? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the GPL is not no-strings. No strings would be public domain. GPL is more like 1 string -- if you release it, provide source. Depending on your philosophy and whether or not you agree with the GNU Manifesto, that's either a whisper-thin thread or a big thick rope that weighs you down.
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
To begin with, you're playing down the issue here. Many or even most linux distribution refuse to carry
XFree86 under the new license. Not because it's not 'free enough', but because they see it as difficult and/or impractical to be compliant with it.
I suppose your clients also want to have software which is well-known and well-supported? Well, then you should also be concerned about the consequences of XFr
Re:More infighting? (Score:2)
No, this is not so. It is possible to get good-quality software with no strings attached, but there is nothing that prevents a group from offering good-quality software with reasonable strings attached (like for example Xfree86). Keep in mind also, that Linux (as all GPLd and LGPLd software) most definatly comes with strings attached.
Re:Rant time!! (Score:1)
Every cable provider I've seen caps upstream to around 20k/sec.
I haven't seem them all, though; I switched to DSL as soon as I move, and haven't looked back. [no anti-server b/s, much less 'lag', etc] course, it's more expensive to get an equivilent downstream, but..
Re:Rant time!! (Score:1)
here in switzerland it is the other way around
more bandwith with cable, no disconnection after 20h, not even a change of the IP for many month(as long your PC is online), better pings
2mbit/512kbit for around 50$
Re:Rant time!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Gripe 1: A packet gets sent EVERY TIME THE CURSOR BLINKS!
Could it be possible to specify the cursor blink rate in X-windows?
Gripe 2: Why does the ENTIRE app need to redraw itself (using huge amounts of network bandwidth) every time I obscure it with a window or hop to another virtual desktop???
Could X-windows support display lists like OpenGL?
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
Re:Rant time!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway... a large part of the slowness over the network are caused by the toolkit and the apps, not by the protocol itself! QT and GTK do not use the X protocol efficiently.
Until the toolkits and apps are fixed, use NX compression [nomachine.com]. I heard it does wonders and makes Mozilla usable even over a modem.
I always hear this (Score:2)
Well, when the hell is it going to get fixed? I've been hearing this problem for years.
Y-Windows [y-windows.org] seems to fix all the problems with X anyway. I can't wait for 1.0.
Re:I always hear this (Score:2)
And frankly, all the Slashdot crowd does is pissing off developers. One even said developers should be slaves, and got modded up to +5! It's exactly because of this kind of attitude why Slashdot is preventing Linux from succeeding on the desktop: the belittlelin
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:Rant time!! (Score:4, Insightful)
The latter is a problem with the app, not with the X protocol. The X protocol allows it to notify an app when its windows are mapped or unmapped, so the app needn't attempt to make the cursor blink in an unmapped window.
That's a problem with the capabilities and/or configuration of the X server, but not with the X protocol. The protocol allows backing store and save under.
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:Rant time!! (Score:2)
Xmove would be great except... (Score:2)
It crashes on even the most simplistic applications like xterm.
I guess part of the reason it's uselessly unstable is that it hasn't been updated since 1997 . It speaks an ancient dialect of X11 and barfs on anything more recent.
Re:Rant time!! (Score:2)
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
Re:Rant time!! (Score:2)
It doesn't. X11 has perfectly reasonable ways to specify right now that only a certain region was obscured by another window. That doesn't mean it isn't easier for application developers to interpret Expose events to mean "oh, better redraw everything". If this is really the case, don't blame X, blame the toolkit developers, it's their fault. The
Re:FARCE (Score:2)
The Foundation has been instrumental in the last two releases, which were on schedule and of very high quality.
The same people are certainly not elected to the board every year. Case and point, the founder of Gnome himself, Mr. Miguel de Icaza was lost his seat on the Board this year because his application was late.