GMOME, KDE Developers' Open Statement on XFree86

[Daniel Stone]

[Moving this off -devel].

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 03:29:55AM +0100, Kurt Pfeifle scrawled:
> you might kindly bother to squint at the forum at xfree86.org list itself,
> *very* newly created, less than 5 days ago. It is also available at
> 
>   http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/date.html
> 
> for your reading efforts. You'd *possibly* come to a conclusion that
> interested people and parties from the outside have actually been
> *invited* to comment, by the very people who constitute the Core Team
> carrying XFree86, the subject of the statement you so fiercly oppose.

Grep that page for "Daniel Stone".

> However, I am open to hear your different interpretation of the first
> opening mail on that list, reading "Invitation for public discussion
> about the future of X", issued last Thursday, signed by "The XFree86
> Project Board of Directors".

I'm not going to say anything on this. I know more about the situation
than you think (see http://penguinppc.org/~daniels/README for why I
could possibly have more to do with the situation than you think).

> Please, try to get into a habbit of dissipating *informed* comments only
> about $subject. Otherwise the impression your behaviour imposes on me
> isn't turning into a favourable one.

I've been involved in XFree86 stuff for quite some time, and was
involved in this debate before it started, to an extent. Keep the
ad-hominem attacks out of it; doubly so when you're wrong.

> Also, I think a statement like the above was even appropriate if the direct
> invitation hadn't been issued. What would you do if there *was* a fork in
> XFree86? You'd possibly have to *decide* (instead of just comment) --
> decide which one of the forks you'd start to support first (even if you
> wanted to support both in the end)... You'll be forced to *decide*
> something about the mess (or the chance, depending on your point of view):
> in other words, you'd "get your hands dirty" and "interfere in other
> project's politics", as you see it....

My decision has been made. KDE cannot make a decision until anything
happens, so making a statement saying "we don't know what's going on,
and can't make a decision until we do", is dumb.

> I'm quite sure, if something similar had happened on the LKML, a lot of
> the people who now want to play "dig your heads deep into the sand"
> would shout loudly and take one side or the other, forgetting what they
> preach today....

I'm not commenting on this issue in my position as the XFree86 4.3
maintainer for Debian; I'm only ever going to comment on this issue in
the context of being a concerned KDE developer who doesn't want to see
an organization he values, become one that interferes in other projects'
politics unnecessarily.

> >What next, a statement saying "vote [1] tbm for
> >DPL"?
> 
> Get over it. Nothing like that is in the statement.

It's interference in another project's politics, pure and simple.

-- 
Daniel Stone 	     <daniel at raging.dropbear.id.au>             <dstone at kde.org>
Developer - http://kopete.kde.org, http://www.kde.org
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