X11, Xlibre, and the Schism at the Heart of Open Source

https://gizvault.com/archives/the-schism-at-the-heart-of-opensource

by ricecat • 1 year ago

8 4 1 year ago

  > For now, the question is not whether Xlibre will succeed technically.

It doesn't have a chance. It would have made more sense if he forked Wayland, and started to work on bring it up to feature parity with X11. That would have been a good "let me show you how it's done" move. But alas.

olemindgv2• 1 year ago

He is going to loose either way, either forking X11 or Wayland. I think making Wayland more open is the key.

olemindgv2• 1 year ago

Not sure if there is a conspiracy theory behind. By all means, X11 has been nearly 40 years since its birth from MIT, many things, both the network and underlining architectures, have seen significant changes.

zahlman• 1 year ago

The sheer petulance of the Xorg developers is really quite stunning, not to mention the obsession they demonstrate with the politics of their enemies (the ones they make on political grounds). For example, here's Jordan Petridis:

https://mastodon.social/@alatiera/114661446785833161

Imagine proposing that people who fork an open source project, out of frustration that you don't maintain it, are thereby doing something wrong. Imagine publicly celebrating "killing" an open-source project that your(?) community somehow "owns".

Imaging going on at length about everything you can dig up about the politics of someone who has wronged you; now imagine feeling wronged because the other party exercised the rights granted under the MIT license. A reminder here that the definition of Open Source, as curated by the OSI, requires "The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons." (https://opensource.org/osd). Not for any reason, including not liking their politics. Not even if you think they'll discriminate against someone else (I see no actual reason to believe this of Weigelt). As long as they follow the license you grant them.

And then there's this blog post about how X11 support is being dropped from GNOME:

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-...

Try to imagine a right-winger signing off a blog post with something analogous, completely unrelated to the technical content of the post. I can't. (I'm not quoting it because a) I'm not here to critique the views and b) I'm trying to be better. This is supposed to be a meta-level point, about how much they talk about politics and use political identity - not about what the politics in question actually are.)

I'm not at all surprised to learn that this guy is (theoretically) young enough to be my kid.

X11, Xlibre, and the Schism at the Heart of Open Source

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