By Michael Kerrisk
September 26, 2012
During the 2012 LinuxCon North America conference, Richard Fontana, legal
counsel at Red Hat, began a rather philosophical talk with what seemed to be a
rather philosophical question: how do we decide what is free and open
source software (FOSS), or rather, how do the organizations that have taken
on this task make these decisions?
However, he immediately pointed out that this is in fact a rather
practical problem, since if we can't define FOSS, then it becomes rather
difficult to reason and make decisions about it.
Many users and organizations need to make practical decisions based on
the definition of FOSS. Individual users may have an ideological preference
for FOSS. Software projects may need to know the status of software as
FOSS for legal or policy reasons. Some of those projects may want to
exclude non-free software; some Linux distributions may want to confine
non-free software to a separate repository. Many governments nowadays have
software procurement policies that are based on free
software. Acknowledging the presence of Bradley Kuhn, executive director of
the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) in
the audience, Richard noted that the SFC requires the projects that it
supports to be under a free software license. Some project-hosting web
sites likewise have hosting policies predicated on a definition of
FOSS. (Examples of such policies include those of SourceForge
and Oregon State
University's Open Source Lab.) Finally, some corporations have policies
governing the use of open source software. All of these organizations care
in a quite practical way about the definition of FOSS.
Deferring to authority
Richard didn't explicitly explain the origin of his talk title, but
with a little reflection it became clear. The "commons" is of course the body
of software that the community considers to be free. "Gatekeeping" is the
process of admitting software to the category "free". What then is the
"tragedy"? For Richard, it is the extent to which a freedom-loving
community has surrendered the decision about what constitutes FOSS;
instead, we commonly defer to authorities who make the decision for
us. When people do consider the question of what is free software, they
often say "the OSI [Open Source
Initiative] has this figured out". Or they take the same approach with
the FSF (Free Software Foundation).
Sometimes, people or organizations do consider this question more
deeply, but they ultimately arrive at a justification to defer to an
authority. Richard mentioned the example of the UK-based OSS Watch. OSS Watch recognizes that
there are many definitions of open source, but for the purposes of their
mission to advocate open source software in higher education, they've made
the decision to accept the set of OSI-certified licenses as their
definition. OSS Watch's justification for deferring to the OSI is that it
is a quick way to accept that the code is open and "accepted by a
large community, and if you've ever seen the OSI license list, you'll
realize that is ridiculous." On the other hand, Fedora rejects the
OSI as an authority for the definition of free software, and instead adopts
the FSF's definition, on the basis that the FSF has the competence to make
this definition. (Richard somewhat humorously expressed the Fedora approach
as "What would RMS [Richard Stallman] do?")
Three organizations have tried to define FOSS: the FSF, the OSI, and
the Debian project. These organizations have taken both a legislative and a
judicial role, and Richard observed that this raises a separation-of-powers
issue. He quoted Bradley's statement
that "the best outcome for the community is for the logical conjunction of
the OSI's list and the FSF's list to be considered the accepted list of
licenses". The point here is that even though Bradley often disagrees with
the OSI, he clearly sees that it's in the best interests of the community
that no single group acts as legislator and judge when it comes to defining
FOSS. Richard then turned to examining each of these three authorities,
looking at their history and processes, and offering some criticism.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF)
The FSF has had a definition of software freedom as far back as 1986.
By 1999 that definition had evolved into the well-known statement of the four software
freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it
does your computing as you wish.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to
others.
Richard pointed out that this a very compact definition of software
freedom that covers many bases. It includes a legal definition (explaining
at a very high level what permissions the software gives the user),
technical criteria (source code must be available), policy justifications
(freedom is important because it's important to be able to share), and
"autonomousness" (it's important to control your own computing).
Since 1999, the FSF has maintained a list of free and
non-free software licenses, with (often brief) rationales for the
categorization of the licenses. Richard noted that the license list is
accompanied by an evolving explanatory text that is rather useful. The FSF
even gives a rule of construction which clarifies that they apply their
criteria expansively when deciding if a license is free:
To decide whether a specific software license qualifies as a free software
license, we judge it based on these criteria to determine whether it fits
their spirit as well as the precise words. If a license includes
unconscionable restrictions, we reject it, even if we did not anticipate
the issue in these criteria.
Richard then outlined some criticisms of the FSF, but emphasized that
they were all mild. There seems to be a lot of inconsistency in the FSF's
decisions about what is or is not a free software license. He likened the
issue to Anglo-Saxon judicial systems, where the rationale for reaching a
decision derives not just from the law but also from past legal decisions;
an analogous process seems to happen in the FSF's categorization of
software licenses. Furthermore, sometimes the rationale for decisions about
particular licenses is too limited to be useful. Here, he mentioned the
Perl Artistic License, version 1, which the FSF categorizes as non-free
with the following humorous, but not very helpful explanation:
We cannot say that this is a free software license because it is too vague;
some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not
clear.
Another criticism that Richard raised is that the FSF is sometimes too
formalist in its analysis of licenses, ignoring factors that are external
to the license. Here, he mentioned the example of the Pine
license. The Pine email client, developed at the University of
Washington, had a BSD-style license for many years. But, at a certain
point, and contrary to widespread understanding of such licenses, they
claimed that the license did not give permission to redistribute
modified versions. The FSF saw this as a textual problem, hinging on how
particular words should be interpreted. But, the real problem was that
"the University of Washington was being a [legal] bully and was
giving an unreasonable interpretation of license."
Richard's final criticism of the FSF was that there was an appearance
of bias. The FSF has multiple roles—steward of the GPL, maintainer of
the free software definition, sponsor of the GNU project, and adjudicator
on licenses—that can potentially conflict. "Could you imagine
the FSF ever saying that a version of GPL is a non-free license?" Here,
he gave an example relating to the GPLv2. Section 8 of that
license allows the licensor to impose geographic restrictions on
distribution for patent reasons. (The GPLv3 does not have such a clause.)
In Richard's opinion, invoking that clause today would make the GPLv2
non-free (here, the implication was, non-free according to the FSF's own
definition) "but I can't conceive of the FSF reaching that view".
Debian
Richard spent some time talking about Debian, beginning with some
details of the Debian
Social Contract (DSC). The DSC was written in 1997 by Bruce
Perens. The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) form part of the DSC.
The DFSG divides the software that Debian distributes into free and
non-free parts, and this distinction has taken on a somewhat ideological
dimension in the Debian community today. However, originally, the main
focus was on being a high-quality noncommercial distribution fashioned on
the Linux kernel project. One of the intentions was to be the upstream for
successful commercial redistributors, and the reason for dividing software
packages into "free" and "non-free" was to signal to their downstreams that
there might be a problem with some software; in other words, the DFSG is a
packaging policy. In later times, the Debian perspective became more
ideological, as Bruce Perens increasingly stressed the free software
ideal. And by now, the DFSG has taken on a life of its own, becoming
something of a constitutional document for the Debian project.
Richard talked a bit about the process of how software comes
to be defined as free in Debian. Essentially, this is a packaging decision
made by a group of elite packagers—the FTP Masters—who, guided by
the DFSG, determine whether software packages end up in "main" or
"non-free". He criticized a few aspects of this process. The FTP Masters
typically don't provide rationales for their licensing decisions (the rationale
for the AGPLv3 was an exception that he noted approvingly). And though
there is a process for review of their decisions, the FTP Masters have
something approaching absolute power in these matters (but he emphasized
that this was not much different from the situation with the FSF).
The Open Source Initiative (OSI)
The OSI's Open Source
Definition (OSD) was crafted in 1998 by Eric Raymond working with Bruce
Perens, using the DFSG as a basis. Richard characterized this as a somewhat
strange approach, because the DFSG is very specific to the problems that a
1990s noncommercial distribution would face if it wanted to classify
package software licenses in order to assist downstream commercial
redistributors. By contrast, the OSD was intended to be a general definition of
open source. Some parts of the reuse work, but some do not. For example,
there is a clause in the OSD that refers to "distribution on [a] medium"
that makes sense in the context of Debian packaging, but is out of place in
what is supposed to be a general definition of open source. These problems
probably spring from the fact that the authors wanted to quickly draft the
OSD, and there was something near at hand in the form of the
DFSG. Notwithstanding some oddities inherited from the DFSG, the OSD did
improve some things, such as the definition of "source code".
Richard described OSI's license-certification process
positively, noting first of all that it has a greater degree of
transparency than the FSF and Debian processes. There is discussion on a
public mailing list, and though the OSI board makes the final certification
decision, there is evidence that they do take serious account of the
mailing list discussions when making their decisions. He did however
express doubts that the board pays much attention to the OSD, because "as
I've, said it's a very strange document".
The OSI has faced a number of problems in its history, Richard
said. Early on, it was accused of worsening the problem of license
proliferation (which was ironic, as OSI had been one of the first groups to
call attention to the problem). This was a consequence of the OSI's
attempts to encourage businesses to use open source. There was indeed a lot
enthusiasm from some businesses to do so, but several of them wanted to do
what Netscape had already done: write their own license. Several of these
licenses were approved by the OSI, and the decisions in some cases seem to
have been hasty.
In 2007, the OSI faced a strong challenge to their authority in the
form of what Richard called the "badgeware crisis". A number of companies
were using a modified version of the Mozilla Public License that added a
badgeware clause. This clause allowed licensors to require licensees to
prominently display logos on program start-up. Although the licenses were
unapproved by OSI, these companies posed a challenge to the OSI by calling
their licenses "open source." (In the end, the
OSI even approved a badgeware license.) "As dastardly as these
companies were, I sort of admire them for challenging the idea that they
should just defer to OSI as being authoritative."
Richard sees two problems that remain with the OSI to this day. One of
these is OSI's categorization of
certain licenses as "popular and widely used or with strong
communities". In part, the goal of this categorization is to address the
proliferation issue, by recommending a subset of the OSI-approved
licenses. The membership of this category is somewhat arbitrary, and the
fact that the licenses of several OSI board members are on the list has led
to suggestions of cronyism and the
criticism that the list rewards entrenched interests. A further problem
with the idea that people should use "popular" licenses is that it
discourages experimentation with new licenses, and "eventually we
will need new licenses."
The second problem that Richard noted was inconsistency in the way that
license approvals are considered. He cited two contrasting examples. In
2009, Carlo Piana submitted
the MXM license on behalf of a client. The license included a rather
limited patent grant, and because of that, it met strong opposition in the
resulting mailing list discussions. Later, Creative Commons submitted
the CC0 license. That license included a clause saying no patent
rights were granted. Despite this, it initially received a positive
response in mailing list discussions. It was only when Richard started
raising some questions about the inconsistency that the tide started to
turn against the CC0 license. Why did the two licenses receive such
different initial responses? Carlo Piana suggested
that it was the identity of the entity submitting the license that made the
difference: Creative Commons was viewed positively, but the organization
behind MXM was at best viewed neutrally.
Are software licenses enough to define FOSS?
Going off on a related tangent, Richard considered the rise of an idea
that he termed "license insufficiency"—the idea that licenses alone
are not sufficient to define open source. This idea is often posed as a
suggestion that the definition of open source should be expanded to include
normative statements about a project's community and development model. In
other words, it's not enough to have a FOSS license and availability of
source code. One must also consider other questions as well. Is there a
public code repository? Is the development process transparent? Is it
possible to submit a patch? Is the project diverse? Does it use a license
whereby commercial entities are contributing patent licenses? In this
context he mentioned Andy Oliver's "patch test" for defining
open source. (Simon Phipps, who is now president of the OSI, has also written about some of
these ideas, using the label "open-by-rule".) Richard said, "I
don't agree with all of that, but I think its an interesting idea"
Conclusions
Richard concluded his talk with a few observations and
recommendations. The first of these is that the historical tendency in the
community to defer to institutions for the definition of FOSS is a problem,
because those institutions have issues of accountability, bias, and
transparency. People should be ready to question the authority of these
institutions.
He observed that the FSF could learn from OSI's participatory approach to
the license approval process. Conversely, the OSI should drop the Open Source
Definition in favor of something more like FSF's Free Software Definition,
which is far more appropriate than a definition based on the Debian Free
Software Guidelines.
The FSF does the best job of providing rationale for its licensing
decisions, but all three of the institutions that he talked about could do
better at this.
Richard thought that the idea of defining FOSS based on open development
criteria ("license insufficiency" above) is based on correct
intuitions. We need to expand beyond the idea of licenses in terms of how we
define software freedom.
Finally, Richard said that software projects can work together in
developing and policing definitions of FOSS. He has seen distributors
working together to share opinions on how they view licenses. Distributors
are also in a unique role for policing software freedom, since they can
sometimes pressure upstream projects to change their licenses. There is
potential for this sort of collaborative approach to be generalized to
the task of defining and policing the definition of FOSS.
[Michael would like to thank the Linux Foundation for supporting his travel
to San Diego for LinuxCon.]
[2013-01-09 update: a recording of Richard's talk can be found on the
Free as in Freedom web
site.]
Comments (15 posted)
By Nathan Willis
September 26, 2012
Left unchecked, talks about supply chains and long-term industry
shifts could easily dominate a business-focused event like the Automotive
Linux Summit, but they were balanced out in the 2012 schedule by
several sessions that dealt with actual code. Leading the charge at
the September 19-20 event in Gaydon, UK was the GENIVI Alliance, which
announced three new automotive software projects that will be
accessible to those outside GENIVI's member companies. There were
also presentations from Yocto and Intel, along with some advice on
where automotive Linux still needs contributors. In most cases, the
actual code remains just out of reach, but it is still progress.
GENIVI announcements
GENIVI, of course, is a collaboration of more than 150 companies,
including automakers, equipment suppliers, silicon merchants, and
software consultancies. Its purpose is to hash out a common
Linux-based platform for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, which
the various members can build products on with a minimum of duplicated
effort. But GENIVI operates behind closed doors; apart from the block
diagrams found in slides and blog posts there has not historically
been any access to the actual specification for those people not
working with GENIVI itself. Moreover, GENIVI has an atypical
approach to being an "open source platform": it is committed
to using software available under open source licenses, but it does not
make that software available to non-members.
The lack of a public specification document and the unavailability of
the software have real implications for the Linux community, because
GENIVI has long maintained that it would draw upon existing projects
wherever possible — but new work would also be necessary to
fill in gaps in the stack. At ALS, Pavel Konopelko estimated that the
GENIVI platform would consist of 80% existing "community" code, 15%
community code extended by GENIVI to meet specific requirements, and
5% purely original work. Some of that work has already seen the
light of day, such as the AF_BUS
patches, but several other pieces have remained absent.
On the first day of ALS, though, GENIVI announced
[PDF]
three specific projects that it will open up for public consumption. They are an IVI
audio management layer, an IVI screen layer manager, and a logging and
tracing framework for use with diagnostic messages. The three
projects are set to be hosted on Linux Foundation infrastructure,
although so far the sites and code repositories have not
appeared. There is a description of each of the components available
now on the GENIVI web site, which sheds a bit more light on their
scope — although the explanations are not always crystal clear.
The audio manager, for example, implements an API for routing audio
that is independent of the hardware and software routing frameworks
underneath. That would appear to place it above PulseAudio in the
typical Linux stack, while providing the same API if a hardware audio
routing mechanism is available instead. The GENIVI specification does
not make PulseAudio mandatory; it only mandates (as an "abstract
component") that an audio router be provided. The audio-routing
problem in IVI includes use cases not encountered in desktop setups,
such as alarms (triggered by bumper proximity sensors, for example)
that interrupt any other audio streams, and routing sound from a
single media source to multiple rear-seat entertainment (RSE) units.
The hardware-or-software approach described for the audio manager
suggests that there are GENIVI members intent on producing vehicles
where such audio routing is handled by onboard hardware.
Similarly, the screen layer manager is described as handling
hardware-accelerated compositing, but by implementing an API that can
deal both with software video sources like applications and with
direct hardware sources like reverse-view cameras. The description of
this component also observes that existing IVI implementations tend to
build such layer management functionality directly into their GUI
front-end (which, in IVI circles, is usually referred to as a
Human-Machine Interface or HMI). Since HMI is generally reserved as
one of the vendor-specific "differentiating components" in a product,
a standard screen layer manager will presumably reduce duplication.
The last component of the three is the Diagnostic Log and Trace (DLT)
project, which is described as an abstraction layer for several
different diagnostic logging protocols. It is said to support system-
and user-level logging, predefined control messages, and callbacks,
and to connect to syslog or other existing logging systems.
At this stage, all three projects are (so to speak)
"announcement-ware," but assuming that the code and infrastructure
follows, they represent a major step forward for GENIVI. If one looks
at the GENIVI platform block diagram (for example, the version on
slide 9 of Konopelko's presentation
[PDF]), there are quite a few
components still designated placeholders or abstract requirements.
It is hard to see how the missing pieces fit into the 80-15-5
percentages cited, but at least the availability of some
GENIVI-authored components should help bring the whole picture into
clearer view for those not part of the GENIVI Alliance.
Yocto, Intel, and others
There are indirect ways in which one can explore a GENIVI system
already, however, by downloading some member company's GENIVI-compliant
operating system. There are a few free options, such as Ubuntu's IVI
remix and Tizen IVI. Holger Behrens from Wind River presented
another possibility, the Yocto project's meta-ivi
layer. Meta-ivi is a Yocto component that will pull in dependencies
for GENIVI compliance.
It is designed to be used with Poky, the Yocto build environment, and
pulls in the mandatory components of the latest GENIVI reference
releases, plus the meta-systemd layer, a separate Yocto component that
adds systemd. The current release of meta-ivi dates from May
16, 2012, and is based on the GENIVI 2.0 specification and Yocto 1.2
(an update is due in mid-October to bump the code up to Yocto 1.3 and
GENIVI 3.0). It builds and configures the GENIVI and systemd
layers, plus a few standard components to fill in GENIVI's optional
components (e.g., PulseAudio and GStreamer).
Currently, building a meta-ivi system requires login credentials for
GENIVI, because it pulls from the alliance's Git repository. Behrens
said repeatedly that this requirement is likely to go away as GENIVI
opens up access to outsiders, but for the moment there is no way
around it. A bigger limitation, he said, was that currently meta-ivi
is designed only for ARM's Versatile Express A9 boards. This is
strictly a developer-power issue, he added, imploring interested
parties to contribute with "board support, board support, and
board support."
Luckily, there were some software options available today, as
well. Intel's Kevron Rees presented
his work on the Automotive
Message Broker (AMB), a vehicle communication abstraction layer.
The project is an extension of his previous effort, Nobdy. It provides a
source/sink model for applications to connect to vehicle data sources
(from OBD-II diagnostic messages to sensor output) without worrying
about the underlying mechanics source of the data. It allows multiple
sinks to subscribe to messages from the same source, and the message
routing engine (which Rees said was modeled on GStreamer) allows for
intermediate nodes that could perform transformations on the
data, such as filtering or message throttling.
The current version of AMB supports GPS, OBD-II, and CAN bus sources
(the latter of which he demonstrated using a video gaming "steering
wheel" controller). Only two sinks are implemented at the moment,
D-Bus and Web Sockets. The D-Bus output, he explained, was an obvious
choice because it provides a property and signaling system for free,
and allows Smack-based security policies. The lack of security in
Nobdy was one of the principle reasons he decided to undertake a
rewrite. The demonstration was short but entertaining; it utilized a
dashboard display application called GhostCluster to
report mock speed and direction information from the game controller,
and allowed access to faux rear-view cameras, which were implemented
with webcams.
Jeremiah Foster of Pelagicore also discussed the paucity of software
available to interested developers in a session
examining progress between the automotive industry and the open source
community. Foster is the baseline integration team leader at GENIVI,
but as he explained, he spent quite some time beforehand working on
the community side as the Maemo "debmaster." The talk included several
points about how the automotive industry and traditional open source
differed, such as the long-term partnerships in place between
automakers and tier-one suppliers. Some of the disconnects are
changing already, he said, such as the automotive industry's
understanding of how to work with software licenses, but others remain
unclear, such as the lines of legal responsibility in cases where
software contributes to an accident.
A key point, he said, is that automakers do recognize that rewriting
software stacks for every new product is incredibly wasteful, and
there are opportunities for developers and agile software companies to
do big business during the transition. He then outlined a number of
areas where interested developers could work on automotive-related
problems.
The first was fast boot, which is required by regulations (such as
requiring that a rear-view camera start showing live video to the
display less than two seconds after startup). GENIVI has adopted
systemd to tackle this requirement, he said, though it is not
yet complete. Another systemd-derived feature is "last user
context" (LUC), in which a car remembers and restores environmental
settings for multiple drivers (such as audio and temperature
preferences, plus physical options like mirror and seat adjustment).
LUC remains a subject where considerable work is required.
There are also several standard Linux components that automakers and
software vendors frequently replace with proprietary components
because the open source versions are incomplete, he said. These
include BlueZ, ConnMan, and Ofono. All three are missing features and
require testing in more configurations. Similarly, IVI systems require
some mechanism for data persistence, such as remembering
recently-accessed files or playlists. Existing solutions like SQLite
have not proven popular with IVI vendors, who would be happy to see
additional work.
Finally, he said, there remains a lot of work to be done porting and
packaging existing automotive software for the distributions used by
developers. The existing IVI distributions (such as Ubuntu and
Tizen's IVI flavors) tend to start with a minimalist system and add
automotive-specific packages, but this results in a system that
developers cannot use for everyday work. The majority of Linux
developers, he said, would rather port new software than change
distributions. Consequently, bringing the IVI software to existing
distributions will attract more developers than will continuing to
roll out IVI-only embedded distributions. Bringing automotive
packages to desktop distributions could also help the community build
its own answer to the pieces that commercial vendors prefer to keep
proprietary, like HMI.
Although it was good to hear that GENIVI is opening up more of its
code, the three projects announced are just a beginning. GENIVI and
other automotive Linux players do seem to recognize that there is a
void to be bridged between the industry and the community, though.
If the alliance does indeed make its Git repositories publicly
accessible, that will break down a major barrier to entry for the
potentially enormous talent pool of volunteer contributors.
[The author would like to thank the Linux Foundation for travel assistance to ALS.]
Comments (none posted)
By Michael Kerrisk
September 26, 2012
The 2012 X.Org
Developers' Conference took place in the charming Bavarian city
Nuremberg (Nürnberg), over the period 19-21 September 2012, hosted at the
headquarters of the Linux distributor, SUSE.
The conference
program page provides links to pages detailing the various sessions; in
many cases, those pages contain links to slides and videos for the
sessions. Simon Farnsworth took some rough notes from each session, and
these have been placed on a "proceedings"
page; that page also has links to videos of nearly all of the talks.
LWN has coverage of selected talks; these will be linked off this page
as they appear.
Above: XDC2012 conference group photo
Above: Kristian Høgsberg bending the laws of desktop graphics on Weston
Comments (none posted)
On the first day of the 2012 X.Org Developers' Conference, Bart Massey
kicked off a short presentation from the Board of Directors of the X.Org
Foundation, running through the current status of the foundation and its
recent achievements. He began by noting that, with much assistance from
the Software Freedom Law Center, the foundation has now
achieved 501(c)(3) tax status as a US nonprofit. In addition, the
foundation is now a member of the Open Invention Network
(OIN). Although the foundation can't offer any patents to OIN (because
it owns none), "we do have a lot of prior art". Much of
what the X developers are doing is innovative and potentially patentable
[by others], and "if you want that not to happen, you should talk to
us and OIN".
X.Org did not have any Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects approved
this year, and Bart noted the need for a rethink about how to approach GSoC
in the future. On the other hand, in the last year there were four
successful projects (and one failed project) in X.Org's own similar
"Endless Vacation of Code" (EVoC) program, and all of the successful EVoC
students were funded to travel to Nuremberg for the conference. (A session
on day one of the conference reviewed the status of the EVoC program,
looking at the goals of the program and how its implementation could be
improved; video of the session can be found here.)
In the two days immediately preceding the conference, there was a book sprint. This
followed on from an earlier book sprint in March, which worked on the
creation of a developer's guide that was to some extent client-side
focused. The more recent sprint aimed to complete Stéphane Marchesin's
Driver Development Guide. There are now 119 pages of documentation that is
still rough and in need of editing, but a version should be on the wiki in a few days. He noted that one of
the explicit points of adding more documentation was to attract new X
developers by lowering the barriers to understanding the X system.
Bart noted that the foundation currently faces a number of challenges.
The financial organization is better than it has been for a while, but the
once large budget surplus is now starting to run down, to the point where
some real effort needs to be spent on fund raising. In a brief treasurer's
report, Stuart Kreitman expanded on this point: at the current rate of
spending (US$20k to US$30k per year), there's about three year's buffer.
The old days when several large UNIX workstation vendors gave large
donations have—along with those vendors—long gone. New funding
sources will be needed, and X.Org may need to rely more on smaller
donations.
Bart pointed out a number of other challenges that X faces. As with
many projects, but perhaps especially notable because X is such a
fundamental part of our day-to-day infrastructure, X needs more developers,
and Bart emphasized the need for ideas on how to attract new developers.
There remain some infrastructure problems to be resolved (notably, the X.Org web site was down a number of times in the
lead-up to the conference). Then there is the whole "future of Wayland thing". Although the
Board does not set technical directions, "it's clear that Wayland is part
of the X world", and the question is how to support the transition to a
potentially "Wayland world".
But, notwithstanding these and other challenges, Bart stressed that "I
couldn't be more excited about what's happening", and certainly the level
of interest and detail in the three days of presentations seem to justify
his excitement.
A pointer to a video that includes the status session can be found here.
Comments (6 posted)
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