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FreeBSD Moves to X.Org
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Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall
make.conf (Score:4, Informative)
X_WINDOW_SYSTEM=xorg
in
X_WINDOW_SYSTEM=xfree86-4
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's Left? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenBSD [openbsd.org] is still using the latest XFree86 4.4 release candidate with the old license+drivers. And NetBSD [netbsd.org] incorporated XFree86 4.4 with the new license.
Portupgrade neither necessary, nor sufficient (Score:5, Informative)
No. It says in the post:
To upgrade, you must remove your XFree86 ports and install the xorg
ports. It couldn't be done with portupgrade, unfortunately, because we
are keeping the XFree86 ports around.
In other words, you cannot automatically upgrade all the ports using portupgrade.
As for portupgrade becoming necessary, I don't know what you're talking about. While I use it (to keep my -CURRENT current), this is merely for convenience: I haven't seen any ports that depend on it.
Re:Who is left...? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The lesson of X11.... (Score:1, Informative)
So they basically assed out gnome and even freebsd doesn't want to dump gnome so some asspuppy at X can have his ego stroked when there is a fine alternative.
Re:Who is left...? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The lesson of X11.... (Score:5, Informative)
They added an advertising clause. Similar to the old BSD license.
There's a reasonable argument that the license change by itself didn't cause the exodus. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. There has been friction between the XFree developers and the rest of the FLOSS community for quite some time. There has even been considerable friction within the XFree team which led to the infamous "eviction" of Keith. But until recently there haven't been any realistic alternatives to XFree.
It remains to be seen whether Xorg can deliver better than XFree. Initial signs are promising; the codebase is being broken up and autotooled, cutting edge extensions like Xcomposite are being integrated, some of the best and brightest have committed themselves to Xorg instead of XFree, the distributions are backing Xorg over XFree, and (most important of all) the Xorg developers are COMMUNICATING with the rest of freedesktop.org (eg, the projects that build upon X11/XFree/Xorg). Those changes alone are a significant improvement over XFree.
Re:Who is left...?like (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Xorg vs XFree86 (Score:4, Informative)
XFree86 seems to be mostly listing, with it's major focus being drivers. It was always easier to get new extensions in XFree than in the reference implementation, but that was still hard, so driver's and performance were much of it's force and they seem to think that it still will be. XFree seems to think that they will be the application that people upgrade to from X.org for their value added improvements. Short term assessment, this is a load of crap. People are moving from distro's X.org and XFree ONLY for stability concerns, and those are easily assuaged.
X.org is all about two things. One, take the protocol to the next level, through the judicious use of extensions. X.org has support from Sun and HP, for example, Sun is moving much of their Looking Glass work into the tree.
Second, get the implementation out of the stone age. Modularize the build, and use a more modern build system. Clean up the DDX (device dependent X) get extensions playing well with each other, havea faster release cycle and get security and bug fixes from vendors incorperated more quickly. All of this seems to be happening. Hop on the X.org mailing lists and take a look.
Re:Who is left...? (Score:3, Informative)
The good postscript fonts "know" things about human perception and thus render themselves in different fashions based on that knowledge. Simple vectors can't do that because vectors aren't just for fonts and human perceptual tricks that apply to fonts don't necessarily apply to other kinds of vectorish information.
Re:What about Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
You can get X11 for OS X here. [apple.com]
Re:The lesson of X11.... (Score:4, Informative)
Generally, building from a source package or building your own package (not that difficult if you're up to compiling from source anyway) works a _lot_ better.
Re:Who's Left? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Name change... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The lesson of X11.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Cautionary Tale of XFree86 (Score:3, Informative)
It turns out a few files have slipped in with licenses other than the MIT/X licenses. My appendix links to a detailed license analysis (I didn't do the analysis, kudos to the person who did!). But there aren't many such files, and it wouldn't take much to fix them. It's likely that some weren't even intentional, and contacting the authors would be all that's needed in some cases.
I very much doubt that they'd move to the GPL. This is a project shared between GPL'ed operating systems, *BSDs, proprietary X vendors, and proprietary OS vendors; a GPL move would break that. I guess it's conceivable they'll later move parts to the LGPL, particularly easily separable parts (like a sound server). Mesa was originally LGPL, for example. And the commercial environment has changed since X was started; some projects like Wine [winehq.org] have decided to switch from MIT/X/BSD-like licenses to the LGPL, because they believed that too many commercial companies would take but not give back otherwise (rendering the project unable to continue). So you could argue that the changed environment might encourage them to use a different license to keep the project more viable. But I suspect that won't happen, at least in the short term. Most people seem to be interested in keeping the "status quo" MIT/X license, and more interested in rearchitecting and adding new features. I don't speak from special authority, just as someone who occasionally follows the discussions.
Re:Not to troll or anything (Score:3, Informative)
...
Hell, most linux users won't ever know they're running xorg until they have to edit their xorg.conf to get those NVIDIA drivers working.
These sentences seem to contradict slightly. You know Linux is just a kernel, right? As in as far to the back end as it's possible to get without touching actual hardware?