X.Org: "2013 Will Be The Year Of Mobile Wayland"

The 2013 State of X.Org Report has been issued by Bart Massey on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation. There isn't too much new information out of this brief report, but they may be doing less X.Org "katamari" releases or abandon this process all together. The annual report also expresses a belief that 2013 may be the year of "Mobile Wayland."

The X.Org Foundation is now a 501(c)3 and they have intended for these annual reports to be, well, annual, but this is their first report since 2010. Their previous report can be found on the X.Org Wiki. When asking Bart about the lack of reports back at XDC2012 in Germany, it was a combination of forgetting / simply not doing the annual reports in time. Fortunately, there's a report out for this year.

Sadly, the foundation is still truly an organizational mess with little positive action beyond sponsoring of students through the Endless Vacation of Code and organizing the annual developers conference. Highlights of the report include:

- X.Org 7.7 was released last June. This "katamari" release brings multi-touch, XCB improvements, and an assortment of other updates from the individual X.Org components.

- The 7.7 release was the first since December of 2010. However, developers feel that the "katamari" releases are no longer really useful and are a drain of their (limited) resources. As a result, future katamaris might be even longer between releases or not come at all. They say this isn't bad but that X.Org is just better modularized.

- Wayland grew a lot in 2012 and the X.Org Foundation wants to foster its development.

- XDC2012 happened last year in Germany.

- X.Org tried to be part of Google Summer of Code 2012 but were rejected.

- There's finally students participating in the X.Org-funded "Endless Vacation of Code" project. Qualified students interested in X.Org, please go check it out!

- The book sprints that happened in 2012 for trying to come up with better documentation were basically failures. Stéphane Marchesin (Nouveau project founder) though can be applauded for the book he largely worked on about graphics driver development. There wasn't much participation in these book sprints and the "books" that came as a result aren't yet complete -- nor will they probably ever be completed. This isn't a huge surprise since even back when I was organizing XDC2011 Chicago they wanted a book sprint but interest level by the development community was basically nill.

- X.Org Foundation membership level is at 72, which is about halved from the level it was at two years ago.

- The foundation joined the Open Invention Network.

- The X.Org Foundation hasn't managed (or really tried) to find any new recurring sponsors in the past two years.

- The X.Org Wiki has suffered from spamming and other infrastructure problems.

- The X.Org Foundation needs a new logo -- something that's been talked about for years and is still being talked about, but never acted upon, even after many Phoronix readers tried submitting proposals three years ago.

- "The state of the X.Org Foundation is strong. The X Window System continues to be the go-to graphical infrastructure for Open Source desktops. Building on previous prognostications, I quite confidently predict that 2013 will be the Year of Mobile Wayland. I'm looking forward to it."

The State of X.Org report in full can be read on the Xorg mailing list.