“There’s another schism going on in the Linux world. Just in case you’ve been under a rock in the last few months the XFree86 team has changed their license. There’s an uproar from several of the largest Linux distributions where they’re refusing include XFree86 4.4 in their new releases. This is bad news for a few but also in the middle of this conflict begs the question. What are the alternatives?” Read the editorial at Linux.Warcy.com.
Beyond XFree86, Searching for the Alternative
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The article is pretty light on the facts, and manages to miss 1/3 of the possible alternatives (the X.org X branch).
I tried (without success) building Y-Windows a few weeks back. Has anyone had any luck with this? I am on Slackware 9.1 2.4.22-i686. Most of my libs are stock, though I do have add-ons. (Including those mentioned as dependencies for y-windows.) This may not be the proper place to fully discuss this, but could anyone point out a link? I would prefer a sort of HOWTO over a Slackware tgz package.
I don’t understand both parties. I don’t understand XFree86 because claiming that something is yours which it is not is a criminal act (punishable with up to 3-5 years of jail in my country), you do not need a license to prevent that. In other words, the whole licensing change is nonsense.
And I do not understand the rest of the community. Ok, the license does not allow you to remove the copyright message. Since removing a copyright message from a GPL product can be just as illegal (not by license, but by law), it can be questioned wether the XFree license imposes an additional restriction.
I’m not a lawyer, but all I want to say is that I seriously question the GPL incompatibility.
Second, it would be a very bad idea to remove copyright notices at all, because the original author is the only person in the world who can enforce the license.
Third, the XFree group has acommodated for the possible linking incompatibilities, by excluding the X libraries from license changes.
And for the fourth point, there has allways been code with an advertising clause license in XFree86 and nobody has ever complained.
Now I hope people will really soon concentrate on more important matters, GPL violations enough, as this kind of stuff is really counterproductive to the open source community.
(I wrote the same text today in reaction to a news item on Linux Weekly News)
Is it that one? http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/xorg
Then they’ve seriously missed one.
Although Aqua would be a nice DE, it is useless without X. You cant compare the two since they are different products. It would be like comparing X and KDE/GNOME. Without X, KDE is useless and so too would Aqua be. What would be really great is Quartz Extreme. If you could replace X with Quartz (which provides all the nice eye candy) that would be awesome, though you would lose many of the nice features of X (driver support, network transparency, etc…)
Wasn’t open source about giving freedom to users, making them depend less on the original authors of the software?
Oh, wait, let me guess – those distro makers who have been taking XFree86 for granted are now too lazy to write their own software to sell, right?
If/when the fd.o server is feature-complete, it’ll actually be cooler than Quartz Extreme. QE still does mostly software rendering of Quartz 2D. This is partially due to the architecture of Quartz: Applications render directly into shared memory buffers, and the compositor uses OpenGL to merge them together.
Ironically, X’s client/server nature might actually help out ehre. Consider what happens to OS X when you throw OpenGL-accelerated drawing into the mix: each app renders via OpenGL into its own window buffer, then the compositor composits it. This sounds simple until you realize that it’ll have problematic performance — it requires an OpenGL context for each application window, but current consumer hardware is optimized for a single renderer at a time. Its not like SGI hardware that has fancy context-management features. In contrast, X is a client/server architecture. Thus, it can do all drawing in the server’s context, requiring only a single OpenGL context.
Now, when Longhorn comes out, and graphics manufacturers rush to adapt, multiple-renderers on current hardware will probably get much better. However, that’ll take time, and X could possibly have an important head-start during that time.
I successfully compiled it.
Each of these projects have good foundations. I hope to see one that is as deep as Mozilla. The “X” server is a great idea that is capable of adapting and evolving. It has proven to be useful with a variety of system configurations.
I know, there have been problems…… but….
I think we’re seeing some geniune interest and momentum to move development into the wild. The future looks good.
Like whom??
SUSE, Redhat, Mandrake, Lindows, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware??
Any link to any distribution which officially declared that they’re going to drop XFree86 or this is just the regular FUD we’re used to?
is that compatible with gnome/kde etc?
All X servers (with the appropriate modern extensions) are compatible with KDE/GNOME/etc. This includes Xouvert, XFree86, FD.O’s X Server, the X.org X server, XiG’s Accelerated X, and MetroX.
bwah, we do want osx, we don’t care for aqua thought
beqyond that the “article” was unintresting ;D
… I hope they don’t choose an idiotic childish name.
From reading the latest gtk2.3.x anouncement comments users are saying there is that ATI’s drivers will not work with it. So what’s the deal? No opengl loving for Nvidia and ATI? I could care less about transparency, which is the only thing tha seems to come up when touting FD.o.
And for the fourth point, there has allways been code with an advertising clause license in XFree86 and nobody has ever complained.
Yeah, I believe that’s the SGI GLX code that has the advertising clause. And to your other point, if the actual X libraries don’t have the new license then there shouldn’t be a problem. But don’t let that stop Stallman from stirring up trouble and pushing back progress on the linux desktop.
“Like whom??
SUSE, Redhat, Mandrake, Lindows, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware??
Any link to any distribution which officially declared that they’re going to drop XFree86 or this is just the regular FUD we’re used to? “
I have not seen where any distribution is dropping support for XFree86, however they have stated they will not include XFree86 4.4. They will only supply 4.3 with the GPL compatible license. This can be found on Mandrakes web site I know, but not sure exactly where on the others. It has been published though. From everything I saw it just means if you want the XFree86 4.4 upgrade, you will have to get it yourself as the distros will not distribute it.
To clarify I didnt mean give us aqua as free.. I’d happily pay for it if I could use it on a non mac platform. Besides apple hardware has little in the way of money left over for apple after sales due to competing with comparable wintel platforms.
Someone did mention that bundling OS X on a Ipod would make apple tons of money.. Though I’d still would like to see a x86 compatible version of OS X someday.
“Wasn’t open source about giving freedom to users, making them depend less on the original authors of the software?”
In this instance, anyone is free to continue development from the last release of the codebase under the old license (XFree86 4.4-RC2) if they disagree with the new licensing terms.
So yeah, users are far less dependent on the XFree86 developers than they would be if they’d released their work under a more restrictive license. Duh.
FD.O doesn’t just support transparency. Instead, it has a collection of rather general extensions that can be combined to do many different things:
Composite: Supports redirecting specific widgets to their own memory buffers. This can be used to support window transparency and shadows, but also to support things like flicker-free resize/move, special window effects (like Expose), screen magnifiers, etc.
Damage: Supports applications getting detailed information about “damaged regions” ie: regions where window events have caused part of a window to need redrawing. This can be used to optimize redrawing, but also for things like VNC that could benefit from knowing exactly where on screen things have changed.
Render: Supports alpha-blended vector graphics. Its the main back-end for Cairo, which is a 2D vector graphics library like Quartz 2D. Render can be accelerated via hardware, so you can have very rich, anti-aliased 2D graphics without slowing down the computer.
While the FD.O server won’t be compatible with the ATI and NVIDIA binary drivers, that is because they are designing a new driver API optimized to support an X server that can take maximum use of OpenGL-hardware. I have a feeling that the advantages of the new server will convince at least NVIDIA to provide drivers for it. After all, they’ve been supportive of the *NIX community in the past, and do make some money off Linux on their workstation line of cards. In any case, the FD.O server isn’t ready yet, so there is little point in worrying about driver support for it just yet!
No, it’s not FUD.
Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, Gentoo and OpenBSD have all announced that they won’t be packaging any of the codebase released under the new 1.1 (X-Oz) licensing terms (see http://linuxtoday.com/developer/2004021803026NWDTLL). Perhaps some others have chimed in since then, too.
I’ve sucessfully compiled Y as well. For tips try the wiki http://y-win-wiki.jciteassist.org/ I am also helping out with development, creating widgets. It is quite nice, but don’t expect a 1.0 release for at least a year, it is a very young project.
I don’t see how confusing this is, the best alternative is obvious: the fd.o Xserver. It’s the one moving towards the future, while keeping X compatability.
Mandrake 10 in their release notes says:
Reverted back to XFree86 4.3 Due to Licensing Issues
Fedora Core 2 will not have 4.4 unless it’s from a non official source.
“Any link to any distribution which officially declared that they’re going to drop XFree86 or this is just the regular FUD we’re used to?”
As well as the above comments, Fedora is (just now?) moving to abstract away from relying on XFree.
They haven’t indicated that they are out-and-out abondoning XFree86, but very few distros have accepted the new licence that comes with using 4.4
Even the unstable, bleeding-edge dev trees of distros like Arch, Gentoo, Source Mage, and Lunar still use 4.3. So we know it’s the licence, and not just the fact that it’s new.
In fact, the only ones I’ve seen that are using 4.4 are Sorcerer grimoire and Ark dockyard. Sorcerer doesn’t surprise me, but Ark does somewhat.
Arch’s 4.4 package is still in testing and is going to be put in the main trees until a final decision can be made, in which case it may be removed.
So yeah, for Arch, it IS because it’s new.
What is fedora going to use in its next release for an X server???
Apparently the Freetype version in Xfree has an advertising clause too.
Freetype is dual licensed, one is GPL, the other is somewhat like the original BSD license. Because of its nature Xfree uses the the other license for the version it includes.
This of course isn’t a problem as anyone can use the GPL license for it. Just highlights that the “evil” advertising clause is “everywhere”.
Speaking about Y window the author states y may bringFonts that look as great as Windows.
My font’s look great, and mostly better than any windows systems I have used.
“I want to say is that I seriously question the GPL incompatibility.”
The lawyers of Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo, Debian, & OpenBSD don’t question it at all.
“Second, it would be a very bad idea to remove copyright notices at all”
copyright notice != advertising clause
“And for the fourth point, there has allways been code with an advertising clause license in XFree86 and nobody has ever complained.”
previous Xfree86 advertising clause != current Xfree86 advertising clause
“Now I hope people will really soon concentrate on more important matters”
Like maybe a better, faster, optimized Xserver with more compelling features than we have ever had before?
“GPL violations enough”
But the BSD crowd isn’t shipping it either.
“this kind of stuff is really counterproductive to the open source community”
Are you sure about that? I want a better Xserver, which is now a very distinct possiblity. I think video card manufacturers should not have a to wait a year to have their drivers integrated with the Xserver, which is now a distinct possibility. I think Xserver developers should be given CVS acess, which is now a distinct possibility.
Please explain in what way these things could be considered counterproductive.
Would you please stop the Stallman bashing? Richard Stallman has given so significantly to the free software and GNU/Linux communities. It is important someone looks out for our freedom and protects it, and i’m stoked RMS is doing so.
In regard to the article, it was really, really poor. Little if any research seems to have been done. Xouvert is dead, by Aqua he means Quartz Extreme. The author also seems to have missed the most important player in the short term: X.org/FD.o. Someone needs to tell this guy having a web page doesn’t make him a journalist.
“But don’t let that stop Stallman from stirring up trouble and pushing back progress on the linux desktop.””
How true. Everyone knows it is Richard Stallman who decides what packages ship with Mandrake, Redhat, Debian, Gentoo & of course, OpenBSD. It couldn’t possibly be that these groups would actually refer legal questions to their LAWYERS! I mean, how wrong would that be?
That the article look like. There are several other windowing system that at par or better that Y-Windows. Since the writer wrote about Y-windows, it is better to write about others too such as PicoGUI (http://www.picoqui.org) MicroWindows (http://www.microwindows.org), Cosmoe (http://www.cosmoe.com), Qt etc.
In the aspect of XFree86 licence, I think the effect of licence change is good since this may lead to more active developement or more support for alternative windowing system development.
most people who work rather than play with X would probably give heavy credit to the X implementation that detected and configured itself nicely. i find that the standard tools that come with X to do this are just no good. if the best work of the distros (mandrake, knoppix) could be fed back to the X developers – then that would be good.
Supposed to be http://www.picogui.com
From someone watching the last 2 years of open source events the situation is not interesting to say the least. If, suppose I want to make a bussiness and relay on open source software. How much is it going to last and how much do I have to spend in the future are two questions with very uncertain answers. A summary of things that happen in the open source world are:
United Linux founded without RedHat
SCO out of United Linux
SCO lawsuit for Linux
RedHat drops support for cheap Linux version
Novel buys SuSE
SuSE out of United Linux
Apache 2.0 license not GPL compatible
Nmap changes their license for the new version of nmap excluding SCO from it
XFree project changes license
Why in the name of God should I relay my bussiness on incertain things? Could the open source community give me an answer on this. No one works for free for long periods of time and everyone tries to get the money for their “free work” sometime.
I don’t say that taking money is a bad thing. Is not free the word that atracts me is the word open. That’s why is called open source and not free source. Nothing is free. Let’s face it. If you could make your custom windows version tommorow what would you say? I don’t care giving some money on software. But protecting my investment is having the code open so I could make changes when I have to.
Okay, ignoring the fact that this guy apparently doesn’t realize that he’s calling for two separate things here, and ignoring the fact that he misspelled the name of Project Marklar (apparently he doesn’t watch South Park), what he’s calling for is technically unfeasable.
The actual rendering engine behind Cocoa is built around a PDF displayer provided by Quartz 2D. The only thing even close to that on the X side of that is X/DPS. They would have to port the Quartz 2D PDF rendering engine from its current backend, Mach message queues and shared memory abstracted through CoreFoundation, onto the X drawing libraries and most likely the Xrender extension. This would be a monumental undertaking, especially considering Apple doesn’t care about Linux at all.
As for Project Marklar, obviously they most likely did an x86 build, but the installation was custom tailored to the hardware of that machine. It is most likely nothing more than a proof-of-concept that all the MacOS X code builds on x86 as well as PPC, but it most certainly isn’t ready for public consumption, and the support costs and business ramifications of an x86 release would be financially disasterous.
Once Stallman stops equating software source code with civil liberties and stops calling people that don’t subscribe to his notion of “free software” as a “social problem”.
The article was poorly researched and poorly written. It adds very little to what has already been discussed and glosses over tiny little issues like the complete and utter inviability of Y for use in the Linux GUI community. Y Is an interesting project- and someday some new OS may choose to use it-but it is simply not relevant to the issues surrounding the future of X Windows for Linux.
From the mailing lists that I have read it seems as if the Xouvert maintainer is now working together with freedesktop.org helping them implement the a) the modularized X lib package and b) the x.org Xfree86 offering. From what I have gathered Xouvert simply took the CVS tree of XFree86 at the time Xouvert got their website up-this would have included the then current 4.3 and the 4.3.99.02 ie. 4.4-rc2 versions of XFree86. The folks at Xouvert then started converting the CVS repository over to ARCH and started the long and tedious process of modularizing the tree and cleaning up interdependencies. AT the same time as this was going on Keith Packard and the gang started switching Kdrive(ie.the new Xserver) from the old make system used by XFree86 to autoconfig. I believe if I have understood things correctly that x.orgs XFree86 server avaible at freedesktop.org will be the code from Xouvert in modularized form and may eventually be switched to the autoconfig build system with the help of the work of Keith Packard and the gang. The modularization work enables the X libs to be handeled completely independently of the X server, which at once make it a good repository of the 4.3.99.02 X server + libs and the new fd.o Xserver + libs. I do not know if the x.orgs offering will also be switched over to ARCH or not-at this point they are using CVS. The mailing lists at Xouvert have been dead for over two months and the Xouvert maintainer seems to only be posting now to the x.org mailing list which is where my deduction that the x.org XFree86 *IS* Xouvert comes from……
> Though I’d still would like to see a x86 compatible version of OS X someday.
Have you gone mad? Wouldn’t it be better if we got cheaper PPC hw and get Apple to allow OS X to be run on hw other than their own.
Good synopsis of what’s going on with the different X groups and how they’re cooperating.
“Once Stallman stops equating software source code with civil liberties and stops calling people that don’t subscribe to his notion of “free software” as a “social problem”.”
As long as that is your motivation to bash Stallman, most people will not take your “input” in the threads seriously. Sofar everything you’ve said sounded like “The world is ending and it’s Stallmans fault!”
You may not agree with Stallman or the GPL. But brushing of real legal implications of an XFree86 license change and blame it on Stallman, will not make the world adhere to your ideas of how it should be.
The license change makes most of XFree86 legally unusable for (L)GPL projects, that is why their is a controversy right now. This is not about RMS at all.
Cosmoe is *NOT* a windowing system, it’s based on X11…
Please don’t mix apples with oranges!
Nmap changes their license for the new version of nmap excluding SCO from it
WRONG. Nmap did not change their license at all. They simply stated that they are not producing anymore versions of nmap for OpenServer and Unixware. Fyodor also stated that SCO is violating his licensing terms (GPL) and therefore they cannot distribute it anymore. There was no change of license, just enforcement of the GPL.
I am obligated at this point to mention SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux – which does support the latest graphics HW on older version of XFree86 (older meaning pre license change) Future looking statement: We are *unlikely* too add specific/certified support for the latest 4.4 release due to issues with the license.
If they are to compete with OSX in terms of visual appeal… integrated support for effects like translicency, shadows, and gradients….
http://www.resexcellence.com/themes/
See how even simple colors look GOOD with nice buttons and some shadows & gradients here and there? Apple has mastered this, and MS seems a bit misguided, placing shadows and effects in seemingly unneeded places. Linux needs some developers to let artists make things like this native. A rewrite like Y-windows might be necessary to get this effect
“SCO out of United Linux”
SCO never left United Linux. That’s the main reason UL was dissolved, because SCO refused to withdraw from UL.
“I don’t say that taking money is a bad thing. Is not free the word that atracts me is the word open. That’s why is called open source and not free source.”
It’s not free as in zero cost (freeware), it’s free as in freedom (open source). A lot of the time it also happens to be zero cost, but that’s not what is meant by “free software”.