Posted Sep 12, 2013 23:04 UTC (Thu) by maxiaojun (subscriber, #91482)
In reply to: Intel and XMir by robclark
Parent article: Intel and XMir
> Maybe I take this more seriously because I'm a graphics driver developer... but graphics drivers are an area where we are seriously outnumbered by our closed source counterparts, and seriously understaffed.
Yes, indeed.
> So needless fragmentation in this area is a bad thing.
This is unrelated. Fragmentation gonna happen when there is conflict interest. And people have right to have conflict interest.
> Hmm, maybe a matter of bad experience with a particular project. I would say that the linux kernel has an "open source atmosphere" and it has some of the most rigorous ABI stability requirements (when it comes to userspace/kernel ABI). And likewise, the client<->xserver protocol ABI is very rigorously maintained. And the wayland crew is taking the same approach with wayland protocol.
Without GTK+ and so, many interesting stuff won't build.
Posted Sep 13, 2013 0:10 UTC (Fri) by robclark (subscriber, #74945)
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>> So needless fragmentation in this area is a bad thing.
> This is unrelated. Fragmentation gonna happen when there is conflict interest. And people have right to have conflict interest.
yeah, perhaps I put it badly.. one aspect of open source / free software is the freedom to take it and try something different.
But, when that something different is something that touches many different projects which make up the (in this case, graphics) stack, you have no right to demand that those various upstream projects shoulder the burden of maintaining your changes.
And fwiw, I'd have the same negative opinion if, for example, some distro wanted to fork a different core piece of the linux ecosystem, like the kernel (cough, cough, android.. although at least in the android case there are some vaguely valid technical reasons)
>> Hmm, maybe a matter of bad experience with a particular project. I would say that the linux kernel has an "open source atmosphere" and it has some of the most rigorous ABI stability requirements (when it comes to userspace/kernel ABI). And likewise, the client<->xserver protocol ABI is very rigorously maintained. And the wayland crew is taking the same approach with wayland protocol.
> Without GTK+ and so, many interesting stuff won't build.
Ok, I guess I am missing the point you are trying to make here. But I'm not really getting the connection between "open source atmosphere" meaning that projects must have no respect for ABI compatibility (or really what has to do with this topic at all). Maybe certain projects have a problem, I'm not really involved w/ gtk+ so I don't really know the details in this particular case.
