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3 comments
Why he forked Xorg: as I understand it there were THOUSANDS of merge requests to address issues in Xorg that were being ignored (possibly because the Red Hat employees who managed Xorg MRs were ignoring them on purpose because they were more interested in Wayland -- but that's speculation at this point). He felt strongly enough about this to fork the projects... at which point, apparently, all of those MRs were closed (and deleted?) making it difficult or impossible for XLibre to pick up those MRs and apply to them to the fork.
(My source on what I wrote are a couple videos by Lunduke.)
(My source on what I wrote are a couple videos by Lunduke.)
That is beside the point. Whether the forked project has any merits for existing doesn't explain the hostility towards its developer. All we know is that the developer was banned from freedesktop.org[1], but no reason was given.
We can argue whether their contributions were a net positive to the upstream project, and I'm aware that they were criticized for breaking the build on `master` more than once, but this doesn't explain the ban. Under these circumstances, forking is a sane choice if the developer plans to continue working on it.
With the recent news that GNOME and Ubuntu will be dropping support for Xorg in upcoming releases, I think it's great that someone is at least motivated to continue improving Xorg. All Linux users shouldn't be forced to use Wayland. This is similar to the forced systemd adoption we went through a few years ago.
[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/182...
We can argue whether their contributions were a net positive to the upstream project, and I'm aware that they were criticized for breaking the build on `master` more than once, but this doesn't explain the ban. Under these circumstances, forking is a sane choice if the developer plans to continue working on it.
With the recent news that GNOME and Ubuntu will be dropping support for Xorg in upcoming releases, I think it's great that someone is at least motivated to continue improving Xorg. All Linux users shouldn't be forced to use Wayland. This is similar to the forced systemd adoption we went through a few years ago.
[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/182...
Given the rants from the same developer on LKML about vaccines, I’m sure their side of the story Re: Red Hat/freedesktop.org isn’t the full story.
Responses to the facts:
1. Cool! No-one wants to maintain X11. People are so stuck on the sunken cost in Wayland that they will stick to their guns and disparage anything else. It's more of an indicator about Wayland than X11...
2. Sounds like they're not popular for recognizing that Wayland _still_ isn't fully-baked, and the X11/Wayland debate is _still_ going because people like me have had way more issues win Wayland than under X11. The Wayland project has some cool and lofty goals, mostly centered (from what I can tell) around improving user and developer experiences - which is a good thing. But replacing something as big as X11 without api compatibility is an herculean task. One that is _still_ ongoing.
3. Their opinions about vaccines which have not undergone the same level of testing as vaccines we've had in the past and which have now been proven to be harmful to quite a few people, should have nothing to do with their code. But we're talking about humans here. I literally had my boss tell me a while back that my opensource projects would be more popular if I was nicer. That's the kind of bullshit that's out there.
Responses to your questions: 1. no - anyone can fork anything that's FOSS at any time, license permitting, to do with as they please. Anyone telling them they can't is a draconian overlord who disregards the opensource ethos (and quite possibly violates licensing). Oh wait, we're talking about Red Hat here. Of course. 2. no, except that it's yet another "poke in the eye" towards Wayland fans who continue to tell everyone how much better than X11 it is. Perhaps it is for them - it's not for me, and plenty others, from what I've read, but people tend to get emotionally attached to their creations. The fact that someone wants to fork and support it means that they have to recognize that Wayland isn't going to sweep X11 under the carpet, that it _doesn't_, in fact, provide an all-round better solution, that all things suck in their own special way, with Wayland having issues for certain users and workloads, and X11 being rock-solid, but architected in a way that means that applications don't have to run and be rendered on the same machine (yes, you can run a graphical app over ssh if there's X11 involved at both ends - it will display locally, run remotely.
So to me, the backlash is just people who are sore that their precious Wayland will have more competition, and that it's likely to be adopted over Wayland if it maintains proper compatibility as well as receiving improvements. It's not a good look for anyone involved.
Responses to your questions: 1. no - anyone can fork anything that's FOSS at any time, license permitting, to do with as they please. Anyone telling them they can't is a draconian overlord who disregards the opensource ethos (and quite possibly violates licensing). Oh wait, we're talking about Red Hat here. Of course. 2. no, except that it's yet another "poke in the eye" towards Wayland fans who continue to tell everyone how much better than X11 it is. Perhaps it is for them - it's not for me, and plenty others, from what I've read, but people tend to get emotionally attached to their creations. The fact that someone wants to fork and support it means that they have to recognize that Wayland isn't going to sweep X11 under the carpet, that it _doesn't_, in fact, provide an all-round better solution, that all things suck in their own special way, with Wayland having issues for certain users and workloads, and X11 being rock-solid, but architected in a way that means that applications don't have to run and be rendered on the same machine (yes, you can run a graphical app over ssh if there's X11 involved at both ends - it will display locally, run remotely.
So to me, the backlash is just people who are sore that their precious Wayland will have more competition, and that it's likely to be adopted over Wayland if it maintains proper compatibility as well as receiving improvements. It's not a good look for anyone involved.
Instead, we get pageful of whining about how bad bad big tech pissed on authors cornflakes. Hate? I don't see any reason to hate the guy. But I also don't see a single bit of reason to take him seriously.