[KLUG Members] XFree86

[Peter Buxton]

Did anyone read the Slashdot article:

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/03/20/1215243.shtml

    It is with regret that the XFree86 BOD announces that Keith Packard
    has been removed from the XFree86 Core Team for conduct that is not
    in the interests of the XFree86 Project. Specifically he has been
    privately seeking out support for a fork of XFree86 that he would
    lead, and has been privately working to form a closed committee of
    invited "vested interests" to address the concerns he has with
    XFree86. Unfortunately he has been consistently unwilling to discuss
    his concerns with his fellow Core Team members or with the XFree86
    BOD. This renders his continued membership of the XFree86 Core Team
    unviable.

XFree86.org has a *BSD-like structure: a team called core controls CVS
access; however, unlike the *BSDs, this core == CVS committers. This is
*SIXTEEN* people:

http://xfree86.org/coreteam.html

KDE, Gnome and FreeBSD each have dozens or *hundreds* of committers, as
a comparison. Even ATI can't commit Radeon 9500 driver patches to
XFree86 without core's permission!

Word has it that Keith Packard does *not* wish to fork XFree86, as core
accused him of doing. But he does seem to have talked to some groups
with a vital interest in X on free *nix (KDE, Gnome, GGI, SDL, and the
Linux distributions, I *imagine*) about creating an XFree86 adjunct to
speed up the coding. Alan Cox has weighed in on Packard's side:

http://xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/thread.html

I expect improvements in the XFree86 world will speed up. Fascinating.

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