On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, G O Economou wrote: >http://www.advogato.org/person/mharris/ > >There are allot of interesting comments here by Mike, >particularly his interest in forking XFree86 and creating his >own work.
You seem to have some deep misconceptions. The only things I've mentioned on there are my decision to branch the Radeon driver and to contribute stuff back to the XFree86 project. How that is seen as a fork of the entire project, I'm unsure. I'll be the first to admit that I'd be completely unable to fork the entire XFree86 project on my own, and that it would be a very large amount of work without any guaranteed gains in return. Some other people have commented after reading my page in some public forums that it was a fork of XFree86, however those people clearly don't posess reading comprehensions skills. Or perhaps, since I'm so long winded quite often, they read what they wanted and made some very false assumptions about what the rest said. I think you might want to go back to the page above and re-read the complete entries of what I actually said. You'll see that I discuss branching the Radeon driver and contributing code back to the XFree86 project. You'll also see that I respect vendors whom contribute code to the project, such as ATI, very greatly, and that I want them to feel that their contributions are very welcome in order to make them feel like continuing to contribute in the future. Since I do not have CVS access to the XFree86 repository, I have no way of commiting the code to the repository (after cleanups and code review, testing, bug fixing, etc. of course) however I do have the ability to contribute nonetheless. I have the ability to take the patches that ATI has contributed, and patch them into the open source code of the XFree86 project myself, test the code, provide sample drivers for users to also test, give me feedback on, debug, do more testing, perhaps talk to ATI, or to other developers whom have worked on the ATI driver. When I have something that I think is a well tested driver, or I can break the thing down into bits and pieces and submit smaller patches, I can help to save the time of David Dawes, or someone else who ends up commiting the changes. What you are suggesting, is that I not be allowed to do this, and that my motivation to take the initiative and do the work myself is somehow "wrong". >At least I think interesting....and BTW doesn't the ATI >maintainer work for Redhat? As far as I know, the ATI driver maintainer is Marc Aurele La France, and while he's done some great work on the ATI drivers, we haven't tried to hire him to my knowledge. Or you could be refering to Kevin Martin. He works for Red Hat however, in our Professional Services department. He is not involved in Red Hat Linux OS engineering with respect to XFree86. Kevin's involvement with the XFree86 project, and his contributions to it, as far as I know are on his own personal private time as a volunteer, much like that of the other people on the XFree86 project's core team. You'd have to ask Kevin personally for the details of what his job role is here at Red Hat, but it isn't related to commiting Radeon drivers to XFree86 CVS as far as I know, if that is what you were insinuating above. Kevin is a nice guy from the times that I've chatted with him in the past, and I plan on talking with him in the next day or so about some developmental questions. Perhaps he can offer me some suggestions for Radeon driver development as well. My job at Red Hat is to make XFree86 a stable GUI platform for our OS products. I don't just do the baseline minimum of what is required of me in order for Red Hat to ship the OS however. I have become personally interested in the code, and in the project and ALL of what I do in my personal time with respect to X development, and a large amount of what I do for work both are focussed on things that I personally try to do to help out the XFree86 project, and the various users who use it, not just Red Hat Linux users. If you read the thoughts I've mentioned on my advogato page without a personal bias or pre-judgment, I think it is quite clear that my own interests lay in helping to build up a community of developers to help the project, and to getting various people working on the project in isolation to work more directly with each other - throwing away personal bias, and breaking down walls such as "you work for vendor A, I don't like you" way of thinking. I have personal thoughts and ideas on contributions I can make back to the project, and to the community of users who use XFree86. I'm not going to let any other developers discourage me from that personal goal. For now, I'm starting by working on getting a Radeon driver out to XFree86 users that contains code contributed months ago, but isn't available for users to test - many users whom would like to use their video cards in Linux before they're obsolete. I've got other ideas and thoughts too, such as the bugzilla idea, but I'm not the only one who wants these things. People shouldn't look with a negative eye at everything they read, but should try to see someone for what they offer in a positive light. I haven't received much encouragement from many other XFree86 developers. I have however received more encouragement from the entire rest of the open source community that got me believing in open source in the first place. While I definitely want to work co-operatively and collaboratively with XFree86 project members and other developers, and I'll continue to try and do so, my commitment WRT X development is first to the open source community, and second to XFree86.org. -- Mike A. 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