Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As Northfield/Norwood 252
An anonymous reader writes "Weeks after Canonical announced Mir, Wayland's display server protocol and Weston compositor have been forked. A contributor to Wayland found differing views with the project over desktop eye candy and other technical decisions to the X11 successor, which resulted in forming the Northfield and Norwood projects. The developer, Scott Moreau, has been outted from the project but has provided a lengthy explanation why the fork was needed to advance the Linux desktop."
More information (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody involved with the wayland project is happy to see weston (the reference display server) get forked to be developed into a more usable desktop environment. That's basically what it's for, and this is far from the first (ubuntu forked it, ADWC was another fork).
This entire article argued he couldn't do what he needs with a plugin alone, which is not relevant to his problem with the wayland community. The problem was his refusal to use the existing mechanism to retain protocol compatibility by copying the existing protocol code into a new extension and modifying in there: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/008172.html
In four pages, he didn't address why he didn't feel like doing that.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's interesting how many people are interested in the desktop.
I just care about MY desktop instead. I prefer to edit some configs (which clearly is rocket science) and experiencing some inconsistent look and feel among applications, than using MS or Apple solutions and submit to whatever their management think is a good idea to stick on MY desktop to make their system more difficult to migrate from.
People want to replace xorg (a fork itself)? best wishes, not a problem for me. Problems would arise when xorg replacements are used to introduce incompatibilities, push one distro ahead of the others, render old software/hardware obsolete. It's not easy to pull such stunts by staying free as in GPL, though.
Re:Ugh... (Score:3, Interesting)
You bought a Media Access Control? How much did it cost?
Re:Just what we need... (Score:1, Interesting)
Absolutely freaking correct. The state of open source duplicity is simply embarrassing these days.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Interesting)
...yet oddly enough I am still using GNOME2 despite everyone's best attempts to kill it.
A fork needs to be popular to be relevant. Otherwise it is just noise. The same is true of distributions. Few people are aware of them all or even how many there are. Most are highly specialized or have no following to speak of.
So effectively the level of diversity you have to consider yourself is far less than what some Usenet troll might want you to think.
The same is true of display servers. These projects have to gain momentum, developers, and users. Mass revolts may undermine that.
Then there's infighting of course...
I have to confess. I am feeling a big mountain of shadenfreude right now...
Re:The primary commit history for the past year... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the desktop on Linux is truly approaching it's demise.
Actually I think the desktop's only future is on Linux.
Most of the regular users are moving on to tablets and phones. Even in businesses I'm starting to see people migrate to just a tablet. There's still plenty of desktop users but at the rate we're going desktop computers will be a thing of the past within the decade.
I'd wager that geeks and Linux types will be the only ones who still want a desktop OS and system by 2020. We'll probably be running on off the wall hobbyist hardware (Raspberry Pi type devices) and hooking up to mostly HD televisions as monitors if purpose built monitors aren't still available.
I'm not complaining - I'll be keeping mine too as even as a technophile I still prefer to sit down to a full system rather than use a tablet, but I truly think that there will eventually be a "year of Linux on the desktop" - it'll just be after most of the world has forgotten about the desktop.