After X there is Y.

Question

During tha last days we discussed about that change of license of xfree86 and in the meanwhile many "bigger" distro decide sto stay with xfree 4.3.0 (with the old lincense).
Some time ago I found out about a new project that was born from a final work at university.
Now this work is going on and there was a call for developers to have it grow up, here is the website
http://www.y-windows.org/
Of course it is in a very alpha stage but hopefully due to the change in xfree it can collect a lot of developer (usually it work in this way  )
For sure there is also another project but I do not rember either the name or the web address, but I rember ithey also started to work on graphic acceleration for some videocard (I remeber matrox is the best supported one)
Do you have any news  about other system??
What about xfree 4.4.0 and arch??

Answer 1

Yes I completely agree with you. To often there is a multipling of the same project or many different project that are doing more or less the same thing with the result of loosing energy in several direction to obtain the same result.
Another problem is that there are projects that are too much "proud" to say ok people time is changing, now there are new technology to use and new need to implement and our code is too old to continue to work on it.
For me is the case of sendmail, at a certain point it becamed so complicate and the configuration so messy that developer need to try to rewrite it from grassroot instead going on.
For xfree is the same. It was a project to create an opensource version of X. In the beginning it was only a system to draw window and have button to close them, it did not had any high functionality and now start to suffer of this.
Now that linux is becoming more and more a graphic system (I hope it never lose its "I can do everithing by command line" charateristic) xfree start to show its limit.
It was never  projected to support advanced graphic features, with reason of course, and most of the feature it has now were added in some way over the code.
Originally it was not a project thinked with big expansion but juts a port.
For instance this is one of the reason xfree lacks in performance. It was never thinked to support propelly graphic accelleration or other advanced graphic feature.
What I like of y is that it does not try to re-invent the wheel, they are using already existing and stable library. They are only re-enginering the core xfree functionality, this is the reason I think they can do a fast develop. I hope doing it they also try to have better modularity for their project so future implementation are real implementation instead of addiction to the code.