[Desktop_architects] Xgl controversy

Aaron J. Seigo aseigo at kde.org
Fri Dec 23 12:25:33 PST 2005


On Friday 23 December 2005 09:33, Nat Friedman wrote:
> For the first 10 or 12 months of development, there was no material
> outside contribution to Xgl. 
...
> largely functional state as fast as possible, without external drag.
	
so .... nobody was contributing to it (really implying nobody else cared 
enough), but you were concerned about external drag? *scratches head*

> There are some specific corners we decided to cut (Don't wait for
> standalone EGL in the kernel, we're running Xgl on top of GL/X). 

makes sense to do what needs to be done ... pragamatism is good.

> And of course we don't mind getting credit for the work either.

there are other ways of accomplishing this. unless you mean "we wanted *all* 
the credit and so decided not to let *anyone else* help" which really makes 
me scratch my head. how much value do you really think there is in getting 
the credit here versus how much good does it do to engage in an open process?

> Obviously, had there been a huge amount of interest from outside
> contributors, we wouldn't have made that decision. 

ok, i'm feeling a bit stupid here because i don't see the connection this 
sentence is attempting to make. i don't see why working on it alone means 
keeping the results away from everyone else.

> It's great that so many people want to contribute now.  That is a new
> development, and a positive one.

yes, it is very positive. let's nurture (as opposed to frustrate) that.

> As for the future, David has been planning to clean up what he's working
> on now and get it in a functional/mergeable state.  The plan is to get
> it working and merged as soon as possible, but he's shooting
> specifically for XDevConf, which is in early February.

great; i'll revisit this issue in february then.

> it isn't very long for anyone to wait.

yes, february is quite close at this point: 2 months. but if you count from 
the initial closing of the project, which is the real cost, it's a slightly 
different number one arrives at.

> P.S. Amusing to see everyone citing a time-restricted LWN article on
> this topic.  Which I have no problem with; more power to LWN.  But oh,
> the irony. ;-)

this isn't about commercialism or time-restrictions, but questioning if 
diverting the development process is the best thing for the open source 
desktop. so there is no irony here; we already know LWN doesn't work with 
others to write their articles and they've always been that way =)

i do wonder is if this is going to be how general OSS devel is to be handled 
within Novell or if this is a one-off, an experiment or what-have-you. i was 
encouraged by how SUSE was opening up (YAST, OpenSUSE). 

either way, it's obviously your choice and i am in no position to play judge 
to your decisions. but knowing who i'm working with makes my decision making 
easier; i assume others are similar in this way.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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