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XFree86 core disbands

Just saw that the XFree86 core group dis­band­ed.

Last I heard, the core group had on­ly three ac­tive de­vel­op­er­s, so it´s not such a huge thing, and the mes­sage says this is an ac­knowl­ege­ment that the core team was no longer rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ac­tive, ex­pe­ri­enced and skilled XFree86 de­vel­op­er­s, or a place where tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion hap­pens ...

This prob­a­bly means that de­vel­op­ment of XFree86 will go on pret­ty much as usu­al.

How­ev­er, de­vel­op­ment of XFree86 has al­ways been a strange beast. A open source project that was de­vel­oped a lot like it was­n´t (closed mail­ing lists for years, get­ting com­mit is hard­er than al­most ev­ery oth­er pro­jec­t).

Al­so, in the last year or so, it has been... cen­trifu­gal. It has spun out peo­ple and sub­pro­ject­s, usu­al­ly not in the best of terms.

I mean, if you look at their mail­ing list archive, there seems to have been some se­ri­ous per­son­al­i­ty clash­es.

Those are of­ten not a ter­ri­ble prob­lem: de­vel­op­ers usu­al­ly have huge egos, large enough that they can shrug off at­tacks would make less­er egos shriv­el ;-)

But put all to­geth­er, and it does­n´t look like XFree86 is a very healthy de­vel­op­ing projec­t. Since it is al­so a very im­por­tant one, I hope ev­ery­one will chill out, or else, that they will get over­heat­ed enough to re­al­ly make it ex­plode, and that one of the re­sult­ing shards will be strong enough.


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