Many distro switch to XORG from xfree86 !!! why ??

what is difference between xfree86 and xorg ????

xfree86 recently changed their license to imply that you need to put their full author credits on any work derivative or attached to Xfree86. Which means that you'll have Xfree86 tags all over the damn place, on work that isn't even their's.

So the OSS people said bullshite. Eat a dick. And moved to X.org.

I didn't know that!
thx Thoreau for the explicit explanation!! great

although it seems very inaccurate...
from http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html :

They don't want Xfree86 tags all over the damn place, the want credit for their work "in same form and place as other third-party acknowledgments." ... in means somewhere in the documentation or where ever that third-party acknowledgments are, which is not "all over the damn place" ... indeed!!

xorg is yet another incarnation of the main x developement branch originally MIT X Consortium or whatever

XFree is a rather long ago fork of xorg specifically to keep the code free at a time when the consortium said (add the expletives above to this post) to the open source comunity..

xorg has been doing almost nothing more that just folding in the developements to xfree for years
including the major changes brought to x by xfree4 so the two are right now rather similar. accept for a few xorg specific things like old modules that will only run on 2.4.x kernels and other old and useless stuff that xfree for good reason never included .

now for the soap opera stuff -- people became disatisfied with xfree -- included some xfree developers and some behind the sceens negotiations began to try to move the Linux x server to xorg and make xorg fully opensource *again* and shall we say screw xfree

this included trying to get xfree to disolve and merge with xorg which would be a really bad idea.

the switch has nothing to do with the xfree liscense change and the idea it does is big xorg corporate marketing spin just like the false notion in the Linux community xorg is a new fork of xfree -- nothing could be further from the truth than these two things.

xfree changed it's liscense to say to xorg well ok you want to take over developement of Linux x but all you have ever done is copy xfree code -- from now on if you just want to copy xfree code you will have to at least acknowledge it's xfree code you are using.

and thus xorg strikes out on it's own with the same huge bunch of big corporates in control of it as always.

The problem with that theory is that the distro's that switched aren't run by big corporations, save Novell- if you call that big.

Long story short, the switch was made because XFree86 is dead. Their developers had toplevel infighting leading to stagnation in total of the code.

Debian is still holding onto the last bastion of 4.3.0 because it's too difficult for them to switch. They also concur that XFree86 is dead, they are just waiting it out. They dislike the X.org monolithic design and hope for something better.

Which may be one reason why Ubuntu with X.org is kicking their ass in usage now. So much so that Ubuntu is encroaching on the apt package pool for Debian. At some point you have to learn to play with the other kids, or you get to learn how to spend your lunch period alone.

In any case, it doesn't matter in the end. Both are open sourced. Both are pretty primative. We have a long way to go before we see Saint Peter welcoming us to video Heaven.

Cool foo_bar_foo, that looks pretty closer to reality...
Why?
...looks like i was far from the truth...
pretty logical! =)
How??

people felt that the developement of xfree was too tightly controlled -- only a few people could commit changes --

it's one of those artistic controll vs openness things.
like Thoreau said, but there is an argument to be made for tight controll in terms of keeping a good design and we see that in kernel the developement team and everybody thinks it's ok , xfree was set up that way.

the real gripe i think was that people would have patches to drivers like ati or the guys at sun would have to submit the patch to bugzilla and it would just sit there and not get implemented for a long time.

as for the corporate contoll of xorg -- xorg for a very long time cost big bucks to get a seat at the table.
now they are all open and anybody can contribute but all the money and i mean lots and lots of it flows from the same huge interests as before and the x developers that work on xorg work often directly for Sun and others -- so you think xorg will do what these corporations want the answer is still yes or away goes the money.

true, but when people start stirring up defection and what not it's never exactly clear who is not playing nice.

I'm not saying i know the answers i just mistrust X.org
-- no longer "the X consortium" -- is now a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization
Jim Gettys, a developer "has been part of the X consortium almost since before there was an X Window project," said the project restructuring's main goal was "rebuilding the vibrant community we had in the early years."

which is to say we are now trusting the core propriatary unix folks with the developement of x.

and again i'm not saying this is bad because funding is important but as best as i can determine now funding for xorg is:
highest (executive) level: Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems
KDE and GNOME, and key Linux vendors such as Red Hat and SUSE (now Novell), occupy intermediate positions. These organizations contribute developers directly to X but keep managerial control of the developers. That means that each of these organizations contributes to the parts of X that clearly improve its own market position and development plans.
IBM and a few small companies participate at lower levels.

is seems that some of the large contributors to the old xorg like the us pentagon and alot of consulting firms are not there or are not being reported

nobody ever wants to talk about the heavy us tax dollar support that went in to MIT unix

very interesting...

but after all the big distros' (i.e mandriva, fedora core) switch was just related to the "artistic controll vs openness thing" or was also anyhow pushed by the 'huge corporative interests' behind xorg?
if executive management of xorg becomes exesive, distros would easly come back to xfree?
is there any difference between the ultimate objetives of xorg and xfree?

the two things are related.
if you are mandriva and you wanted a feature now in xorg your programmer has commit access to xorg cvs so you just implement what you want (openness)
same with sun -- for instance when sun before needed something implemented for the sparc version of xfree or right now the sun guy is implementing an extension for some java 3d stuff the guy just does it and has commit access to xorg cvs. before they did not have this type of commit access to xfree. (artisic controll)

one can only hope that what is good for these corporations is good for x and Linux in generall and it very well might be. Or x might become bloated and the code become poorly designed and overly complex. We just have to cross our fingers and hope x doesn't just become a part of for instance the war between Sun and IBM and used as a weapon to advantage one over the other in relationship to Linux. Part of what disturbs me is the spin. Just before tis happened you started seeing articles and stuff about how x sucked and x was dead and the like. In America marketing has become synonymous with lying and manipulation.

and yes xfree still exists as a seperate entitiy and can be gone back to

without xfree by the way maintaining an opensource version of x when the consortium took it propriatary the first time there most likely would be no Linux today at all.

thx for all that info... quite interesting situation for the open-free-world...

as you say, let's "hope that what is good for these corporations is good for x and Linux in general" but anyway i think the comunity will use xorg just while it'll be open and free "enough" (here i mean open for developers and freee from corporative interests) ... time will tell...