13th December "Smack Down" Meeting

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 01:13:08PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> How about X.org versus XFree86?  :-)
> 
> Actually, this is less interesting, as meeting topics go, as XFree86
> hasn't released any code since 2008, which is exceedingly interesting,
> and rather sad, as it used to be a really vital piece of
> infrastructure.  Quite a cautionary tale - it is remarkable how
> quickly something forkable can become effectively irrelevant, given
> suitably troublesome mistakes.

Given the attitude the XFree86 maintainers were having, I am not surprised
everyone abandoned them to their own issues, and went with Xorg.

XFree86 was a mess, a huge monolithic monster, which made working on it
very hard and not practical.  Xorg is all modular and individual drivers
and tools can be released when they are ready.  Xorg has probably made
more progress in the last 3 years than XFree86 had made in a decade.

> Mind you, perhaps this *is* interesting, albeit difficult to have a talk on.
> 
> XFree86 used to be Really Essential, and in the course of perhaps 2
> years, it disappeared from all important distributions.  The last
> place that it remained was on NetBSD, and even there, it was optional.
> 
> It'll be interesting to see what happens with LibreOffice versus
> OpenOffice.org; I suspect that a similar dynamic is taking place,
> albeit for somewhat different reasons.
> 
> And Mark Shuttleworth should certainly watch all of this with care; if
> Unity causes sufficient irritation, that could turn Ubuntu into a
> curiosity quicker than anyone would expect.

Ubuntu has never been more than a curiosity to me.  They have done some
good things, and they have done some bad things.  From a usable
distribution point of view, the bad seem to be outweighing the good
so far.  It is a distribution I recommend people not run.  Certainly I
won't waste time trying to help people fix their mess.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
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