Some questions for future board members.

[Daniel Stone]

On 10 April 2016 at 19:21, Egbert Eich <eich at freedesktop.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 04:26:44PM +0200, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
>> The fact that wayland now got a separate GSoC project tells me that
>> there is little hope left for rescuing the X.org foundation, but i would
>> like to believe that this is not true.

I guess everyone's happy then, because it's not.

> The X.Org Foundation is open to all projects of the graphics stack
> and has been fostering many projects of them - and this includes
> Wayland.
> Many of the base technologies inside the kernel (Linux & BSD) and
> Mesa which both Wayland and the X Window System rely on are supported
> by the Foundation.
> GSoC and EVoC are only part of what the X.Org Foundation is providing,
> The Foundation also oversees XDC - the X Developers Conference (this is
> how it is called for historical reasons). This has seen Wayland talks as
> well.
> If you look at the blog post announcing the Wayland GSoC projects it
> explicitly points at X.Org's GSoC initiative. X.Org has a much greater
> scope than just Wayland, therefore the Wayland GSoC projects are a great
> supplement to the list of graphics stack related projects on GSoC.

Yes. GSoC has a very limited number of slots per organisation that
they hand out, and as Egbert says, X.Org casts a very wide umbrella.
We saw that there was an opportunity to get a larger total number of
slots by registering separately, and did so. I wasn't involved in the
day-to-day of the GSoC work for either organisation, but the people
who were, were perfectly happy with X.Org and had no cause for
complaint.

Nothing to do with the Foundation, and everything to do with the way
GSoC is administered.

>> And finally, i personally seriously doubt that the move to SPI is going
>> to positively influence any of the real issues the X.org Foundation has.
>> At best, it is going to help intransparency, and probably is more a
>> gentle wind down of activities for the X.org foundation, which might be
>> what some board and even X.org members are steering towards
>> deliberately.

Tying to the point you followed on from, as someone who these days
almost exclusively works on non-X11 open-source graphics, I'd be
really upset at the loss of XDC (its regular coincidence with my visa
renewal dates notwithstanding). It's an incredibly positive
contribution to the wider open-source graphics community. The people
working on this deserve at the very least our support and backing to
help make it better and sustainable.

Cheers,
Daniel