Novell announced today that they’re contributing Xgl enhancements and the Compiz composition manager to X.org. I wrote up a brief story on the announcement, and reactions from Aaron Seigo, for NewsForge.com.
Really, it seems there are two stories here — both good news. First, Xgl stands a chance of doing really good things for the Linux desktop. Obviously, I’m all in favor of that, and I’m looking forward to the advancements that Xgl will bring to my workstation. (It’s all about me, don’t you know…?)
Second, it shows the way the community should work. The Xgl devel process was sort of busted as long as Novell’s developer was doing his own thing outside of public view. Even though the code may be released as open source, if it’s just being done in-house by one company, it really doesn’t get the full open source effect. Now that Xgl is back in X.org CVS and available to any interested party, I hope that it will mean rapid development going forward.
Now that David Reveman’s code is in the wild, I’ll be curious to see the reaction from other developers. It obviously works, but I wonder how well it will integrate with other code from X.org and so forth. I’m not a programmer, so I don’t feel qualified to assess Reveman’s code — but I will be checking to see what type of reaction other X.org developers have. That’s not to dismiss Reveman’s contributions or his code — it might be the greatest software in the world — but it’s not uncommon to see code developed by an organization in-house meet with lukewarm response by other developers because it doesn’t integrate well with the rest of the project or whatnot.
But, again, I want to stress that I think this is a good thing overall. Seigo indicated yesterday that the code was hitting at about the right time to be integrated into KDE 4, so that means that we could be seeing all kinds of GUI goodness by this time next year if not sooner. That may seem like a long, long time in desktop-land, but 2007 and KDE4 (and the next GNOME releases…) will be here before you know it.
