The XGL development model

Posted Dec 22, 2005 7:34 UTC (Thu) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

I personally have met the developers and don't think they would've done this project for Novell if it wasn't to be open sourced, the intentions of these developers has always been to open source Xgl, I doubt Novell has changed that. It just seems more Ximian pushed than big Novell pushed. I'd like to hear what Nat Friedman has to say, but his silence on the topic probably says he might be the person doing it.

And as the code is MIT/X licensed, they can always do in-house stuff once the core architecture is done.

Posted Dec 22, 2005 8:53 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

Bruce writes:

For some reason I am reminded for Corel and KDE. There never was a merge.

Hopefully it'll be more like Apple and KDE where, even though there was a bit of pain at some stages, they did merge code back into KHTML for the benefit of all.

Posted Dec 24, 2005 2:42 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I don't think that it's likely that Novell would be pursuing a propriatory 'value' angle given there history. After all they are the ones that openned up Yast and removed the main 'propriatory value add-on' features of Suse. Also they've openned up numerous software projects and code such as Hula and the like.

It makes sense that as far as X server goes they would want to be open as possible because for 'ISV' attractions to Linux you going to have to use stuff that is supported accross the board. The likelihood of Suse attracting ISV's to itself while reducing feature compatability with Redhat, Debian, and pretty much the rest of the world is pretty unlikely.

I beleive they will release the code, and release all of it.

What I do think however is that it's VERY likely that Novell has entered into NDA's with multiple 3rd parties.

Most likely, I figure, they are getting Nvidia's and/or ATI's to design a driver framework and getting help with some of the memory management issues in X drivers.

Also there is the deal with standardizing OpenGL EGL's extensions. When you look at the OpenGL 'archatectural review board'.. You have IBM, Apple, 3DLabs, Dell, Intel, Nvidia, SGI, and Sun Microsystems.

Many of those companies are not the most open (to say the least) and a few of them is going to maintain their own propriatory OpenGL implimentations that are going to remain closed come hell or high water. Like it or not if your going to build a OpenGL X server on Linux, your going to have to deal with them if you want it to work with more then a fraction of the end users.

I don't know in the past what sort of discussions and their openness revolving around OpenGL standards and whatnot, but I'd bet that NDA plays a large role until the actual specifications are released.

I know also that in the past Novell hasn't had problems throwing around the old NDA itself, even with free software. And some drivers such as the nv involve NDAs.

Of course this is just pure speculation. We won't know until Novell actually releases the code, which I still think they will do.

Not that I like it, though. I think its going to cause problems with this closed behavior. Both in public relations, in developer releations and for technical reasons.