What Wayland's Development Looks Like

With the recent release of Wayland 1.0, here's a visualization that looks back on the development of Wayland/Weston going back to 2008 when it was born as a small project by Kristian Høgsberg at Red Hat.

After being reminded about Gource from the libvirt 1.0 release article this week, I decided to apply Gource to the Wayland Git tree followed by the Weston reference compositor.

The visualization of Wayland's development begins in 2008 when Wayland was born as a small personal project of Kristian Høgsberg. At the time he was working at Red Hat and this was just a side-project, before being hired by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center to work on Wayland full-time where there is also numerous other developers now also dedicated to this X11-alternative.

The visualization begins quite simple and then goes on to show the size of Wayland growing, the splitting of Wayland into the display server protocol / library and the Weston reference compositor, the project being mostly a single-handed initiative until late 2010, and since then its development really taking off.

And then the visualization of Wayland's Weston compositor:

For those curious about other Wayland development stats, including the top contributors to the open-source project, see this earlier article. If you want to try out the latest (experimental) Wayland/Weston technology, check out the LiveCD.