It has been brought to the attention of the XFree86 Core Team that one of its members, Keith Packard, has been actively (but privately) seeking out support for a fork of XFree86 that would be led by himself. He is also in the process of forming a by-invitation-only group of vested interests to discuss privately concerns he has about XFree86 and the future of X. He has consistently refused to even disclose these concerns within the context of the XFree86 Core Team, which makes his membership of that team unviable. As a consequence, Keith Packard is no longer a member of the XFree86 Core Team.
What specifically does the XFree86 bod see as being wrong with the idea of a 'by-invitation-only group' managing X server development? Isn't that exactly what the core team & xfree86 BOD have been doing all along?
Maybe the core team & bod could explain what is being hinted as a new spirit of openness and how that is proposed to effect the XFree86 development process and strategy? Will it mean forinstance an end to the sort of behind-closed-doors discussions that appear to have lead to this announcement?
Please forgive my somewhat cynical tone... The best strategy to fight a fork would be to open up XFree & thereby make forking unnecessary. It seems like that is whats being attempted, but can the leopard change its spots? Sometimes I wonder if it knows it has them.
OK - some concrete proposals, with cynicism turned off:
- Make BOD minutes public
- Open all core team meetings to the public, and if feasible post minutes, transcripts or even audio feeds.
- Extend CVS access to regular contributors. Use scripts or whatever to control access to subtrees if you want.
- Consider dropping the BOD and core team ideas in favour of an elected committee. Examine recent trends in managing other large projects.
Just generally get down off your high horses and accept that the developers out there won't wreck xfree86 if you let them participate & accept them as equals...
Of course, if xfree starts accepting more developers, it will make it harder for us in the dri tree as we tend to benefit from xfree's exclusionary practices -- developers find it easier to get cvs access for DRI than XFree86, so we pick up some talented developers that get fed up of waiting for patches to be applied to xfree cvs. But then again, what is the dri tree but a friendly fork to workaround for xfree's closed development methodology? If xfree really opened itself up, the first thing they'd do is extend an invitation to merge with the dri project, right? Maybe that's the acid test, or maybe it's whether we'd accept...
Keith
Disclaimer: Not speaking for anyone except myself, I had no prior knowledge of these events, and my employer is definitely *not* one of the 'vested interests' mentioned above.
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