[Gllug] X What Next?

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 20:28, Peter Childs wrote:
>     Since XFree86 is basically no londer Free and Debian and  Mandrake 
> are thinking of ditching it.

They *have* ditched it. Future versions from the XFree86 project will
not be in those distributions.

>  What are the alteratives are they any good.

Right now, the alternatives are almost identical to the main code base,
as they were forked only recently. The XFree86 project has, over the
past years, been a rather slow-moving entity. This is compounded by the
fact that a lot of power appears to be vested in the XFree86 board,
several of whose members are not even involved in the free *nix world at
all these days. The attitude these days seems to be that XFree is a
"developer" project, and as such the needs of the several (tens of?)
million X users out there are irrelevant.

With the latest license change, I think that XFree86 as a project has
basically consigned itself to irrelevance. However, there's every chance
that the fork will be better maintained and developed than XFree86 ever
has been in the past. There's necessarily a certain amount of
nervousness that goes with a change of this nature, but in the long
term, I think the ability to fork a project will have once again shown
itself to be a strength of open source. I suspect that for Debian users
at least, a simple apt-get upgrade will at some stage replace XFree86
with an X server under the stewardship of X.org. I also suspect this
will lead to a better user experience, so I wouldn't worry about it....

>     And who (if anyone) is going to be using XF***86 in 12 months.

It may take a little longer than 12 months, but in 18-24, I'd imagine
very few.

>     Is now the time that somone comes up with a big replacement thats 
> going to reform Linux for the Graphical environment and be bigger than 
> windows?

Unlike the XFree86 project, the X window system is here to stay, I
think. Alternatives are all very nice, but the huge body of X11 software
out there is too big a roadblock to any major shift in direction, unless
there's something very wrong with X, which at the moment, is not the
case. It's also still the only network transparent window system out
there that has any significant number of users, and that's a big
advantage.

Mike.

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