X.Org Foundation Moving Forward With Possible Merger

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X.Org Foundation Moving Forward With Possible Merger

The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors is continuing to work on their possible merger with the SPI organization...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYyMzg

[halfmanhalfamazing]

I know someone's going to get upset for me saying this, but, the name of that organization is one hell of an orwellian name.

"The Software in the Public Interest organization"

So is only free software in the public interest?
What if its free, but not open source?
What if its open source, but the parent organization is charging tens of thousands of dollars for it?
Completely closed source, they charge millions for it, but only business-to-business?

Who is the god that gets to define what "public interest" is?

Orwell was an optimist.

[benuski]

SPI was originally created so that Debian could accept donations, its president is a former DPL, and two of its required advisers are a lawyer from the Software Freedom Law Center and whomever the current DPL is. I think SPI is as likely to stick to free software principles as any other organization out there, if not more so.

[schmidtbag]

It wouldn't surprise me if this ends up failing again. X is dying, very slowly and very quietly. There aren't too many things left to do in order to get users to leave X behind as their main display server. From what I can think of:
* Once KDE officially supports wayland
* Once Ubuntu ships an LTS with mir
* Whenever the Razor-Qt/LXDE environment is released OR whenever a wayland compatible XFCE replacement comes along
* As soon as both Catalyst and the nvidia drivers support wayland and/or mir (I'm not sure if this has happened already)
And considering the development rate of the FOSS radeon drivers, the Catalyst issue could be dismissed.

This isn't to say X will go away forever, because xmir and xwayland are still going to be used. But there will likely be a point where neither of those will be needed anymore.

[CTown]

It wouldn't surprise me if this ends up failing again. X is dying, very slowly and very quietly. There aren't too many things left to d+1 to what martin said. We need to figure out how we're going to specify the workspaces' dependencies anyway.o in order to get users to leave X behind as their main display server. From what I can think of:
* Once KDE officially supports wayland
* Once Ubuntu ships an LTS with mir
* Whenever the Razor-Qt/LXDE environment is released OR whenever a wayland compatible XFCE replacement comes along
* As soon as both Catalyst and the nvidia drivers support wayland and/or mir (I'm not sure if this has happened already)
And considering the development rate of the FOSS radeon drivers, the Catalyst issue could be dismissed.

This isn't to say X will go away forever, because xmir and xwayland are still going to be used. But there will likely be a point where neither of those will be needed anymore.

Like X.org's X11 implementation, Wayland is also a X.org project. It's not like Wayland was made by amatuers, X.org developers had a hand in it. In other words, this organization represents Wayland just as much as their X11 implementation.

Also, the Chakra developers have been talking to SPI in order to outsource their legal representation. I'm not sure how far along that got.

[Calinou]

It wouldn't surprise me if this ends up failing again. X is dying, very slowly and very quietly. There aren't too many things left to do in order to get users to leave X behind as their main display server. From what I can think of:
* Once KDE officially supports wayland
* Once Ubuntu ships an LTS with mir
* Whenever the Razor-Qt/LXDE environment is released OR whenever a wayland compatible XFCE replacement comes along
* As soon as both Catalyst and the nvidia drivers support wayland and/or mir (I'm not sure if this has happened already)
And considering the development rate of the FOSS radeon drivers, the Catalyst issue could be dismissed.

This isn't to say X will go away forever, because xmir and xwayland are still going to be used. But there will likely be a point where neither of those will be needed anymore.

Xfce, LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon would need support too... and all the major distributions would provide it by default, too (Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE...).

You'll have to wait a few years before really being able to not use X.

[robclark]

It wouldn't surprise me if this ends up failing again. X is dying, very slowly and very quietly. There aren't too many things left to do in order to get users to leave X behind as their main display server. From what I can think of:
* Once KDE officially supports wayland
* Once Ubuntu ships an LTS with mir
* Whenever the Razor-Qt/LXDE environment is released OR whenever a wayland compatible XFCE replacement comes along
* As soon as both Catalyst and the nvidia drivers support wayland and/or mir (I'm not sure if this has happened already)
And considering the development rate of the FOSS radeon drivers, the Catalyst issue could be dismissed.

This isn't to say X will go away forever, because xmir and xwayland are still going to be used. But there will likely be a point where neither of those will be needed anymore.

well, I suppose the name "X.Org Foundation" is a bit legacy. It is as much about wayland, mesa, etc, as it is about X11.

[schmidtbag]

Xfce, LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon would need support too... and all the major distributions would provide it by default, too (Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE...).

You'll have to wait a few years before really being able to not use X.

xfce is going to be left behind - while it is very stable, it isn't really being updated anymore. Besides, it is known to work in Xwayland. Like I said, X by itself isn't going anywhere for years. I expect X to still be installed on people's systems for the next 10 years, but my point is it won't be the main graphical server. LXDE is also being left behind since the devs for that are merging with Razor-Qt. IIRC, MATE is working on wayland support. That just leaves Cinnamon.


Anyway, I have forgot that wayland is still technically part of X.Org Foundation.