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General software and network General OS-independent software and network questions, X11, MTA, routing, etc. |
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You can read more about the XFree86 licencing issues here.
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From the XFree86 wiki:
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@ Oliver read the rest of the paragraph ;-)
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I doubt X.Org is like PC-BSD*, where best changes happen because of a lot of angry shouting at developers ;-) *I consider PC-BSD the Linux Distro of BSDs, and do not personally consider PC-BSD to be a real BSD system, beyond technically being built on top of one. Quote:
Solaris even has Xsun, which is likely handy on SPARC boxes for a good reason ;-) Quote:
Does SUS allow me to write to a register on my graphics card, and have my code compile and run properly (in so far as that scope) on any SUS compliant system? I've never read POSIX, and have never had time to read _every single page_ of SUS, but I somehow doubt it provides enough to do something like, oh say write an X11R6 implementation that'll run on X86, SPARC, Alpha, and whatever else, so long as a SUS compliant C-based API is there ;-) Personally, I would love it if there was a much larger Universal Operating System Standard Interface (UOSSI) or something.... especially if it just took POSIX/SUS, C99/C++2003, X11, and related standards as token elements: then fixed the problems/holes where needed for portability within defined scope of how portable they want it to be, moved things into the future bit by bit, and fixed the missing links in the current body of standards by adapting a wider scope of features: audio / video / networking / useful kernel interfaces, etc. Until the point where the non portable of today, becomes the as good as a POSIX of tomorrow. Fat chance anything like that will happen in our life times. If it does, it would probably be dominated by Linux, Microsoft, Corporate Interests, or a new comer once the bottom falls out of the others. Quote:
Just like it would be my right, to have chosen DirectX over SDL as the scope of portability for my game: and enforce that at the source level. Having to port C++/SDL/etc would also be much better then saying you have to port my language or highly_machine_specific_gfx_thing instead. I can think of a lot worse things then X.Org becoming more Linux oriented.
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. |
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TerryP said XFree86 & Xorg primarily targeted x86 PC's, and he's right Oko... XFree86 only started in 1991, guess what the 86 in XFree86 is representing?
X Window does have origins well before both XFree86 and Xorg, and it was primarily used on high end Unix workstations in the late 80's.. various commercial vendors have had their own forks of X that developed independently of the free reference implementations. In the early 90's there were a couple different commercial Unix-like operating systems for x86 (..even some for 16-bit 286 processors), users of said operating systems would dial into local BBS's.. if Internet was available they could access FTP servers to obtain binary releases of XFree86. Same goes for the 80's, people using non-x86 Unix workstations would lurk around on Usenet or other sorts of mailing lists.. back then they likely had university access to the Internet and had to obtain the X source directly from MIT's FTP servers, compiling it manually. Looking at the X10R3 tarball that's available at ftp.x.org, many of the files are dated 1985/1986.. 4.3BSD and Ultrix-32 appear to be the only supported operating systems at that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11#Release_history It looks like there was at one point a port of X for DOS, can't find much information about it though. Last edited by BSDfan666; 27th May 2009 at 12:32 AM. |
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I didn't care for the software part at least. I wish, I could say the same for hardware. Last edited by Oko; 27th May 2009 at 01:50 AM. |
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Most people have never used a real workstation, OKO. I got my first Unix workstation in the late 1980s, a Sun 3/60, all 20MHz of 68020/68881 goodness. We had some discussions in the lab whether HP or Sun made the better box (we had an HP minicomputer that did our real-time data acquisition for the entire lab of 20 PhDs with their associated technicians), but the quality of each was outstanding. And it was quite a contrast to the garden-variety 8088-based PCs that most everyone else used. And it ran real Berkeley Unix, though I don't recall if it ran X or not. It had some sort of window manager that used graphics; I'd bet it was X.
The PCs caught on because they were cheap and fast in a straight line. Terrible kludges in many ways, but hey, they worked and were cheap. Did I mention they don't cost much? It really irks me to hear people talking about their garden-variety computer as a workstation. Simply, they are not. These days there really is not an equivalent to the workstations of yore, though perhaps some of the 8-core server boards come close. Even those suffer from the limited architecture, BIOS, and Intel/AMD chips. Yes, this is waaayyyy OT. |
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That is very unfortunate but true. And yes I have to apologize to Terry.
Terry you are technically right. XFree86 refers to i386 architecture as pointed by BSDfun666. I made a honest mistake probably due to the fact that much like DrJ I have not used XFree86 until 2002 or so Probably, just like DrJ, I wish, I had never used XFree86 and PC. Last edited by Oko; 27th May 2009 at 02:58 AM. |
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I don't have quite as strong an opinion as you do in this area. Yes, I do miss the raw performance (in comparison with the mainstream), quality and reliability of both the hardware and software of those old workstations. I never found a single bug in SunOS. They undoubtedly were there, but I never ran into one. You really can't get anything like them these days -- Intel won this war.
xorg has been a mess for me too; XFree was comparatively OK, since it was very stable. And honestly, the hardware has become fast enough that all the rountine things can be done fine on commodity hardware. But my goodness do things break all the time! |
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick |
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As I understand it, the license changed the original BSD license "advertising clause" into a "credit clause", and required attribution be included in documentation shipped in a binary distribution. Many projects/products dropped XFree86, not only because of this special requirement, but also because X developers were jumping ship. Those who dropped XFree86 at 4.4 included Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, and OpenBSD. Here's Theo's announcement in misc@:
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=107696705911864&w=2 Be warned: there's 30 or so responses in follow-on discussion. My understanding is the currently preferred ISC license does not have an advertising clause at all. Less restriction, rather than more restriction. Last edited by jggimi; 27th May 2009 at 12:28 PM. Reason: clarification |
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So it looks like #3 here is the bad guy
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick |
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On the OpenBSD project, a 3rd party port may have almost any license, with all sorts of restrictions. Not a problem. But the licenses in the OS itself are limited, by policy, per www.openbsd.org/goals.html. X is shipped as part of the OS, so I can understand why a special license might be rejected. Theo determined it was not a Berkeley style license, and, as he mentioned in his announcement, the license made the software "less free." His decision was debated, but it was Theo's decision. His project, his rules.
As for the Linux products/projects, my understanding was the concern that this was special license was incompatible with GPL. |
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I'm actually quite used to people not getting the distinction between X Windows System / X11 and things X.Org/XFree86; for me it is much the same as the difference unix-like and Solaris / AIX / etc.
Being quite young to a culture that is quite old (comparatively), a study of computing from the days when a PDP-1 was the new chick, all the way to the modern area. It was kind of necessary to reduce odds of putting my foot in my mouth.... but hey, I love history and being accurate when possible (and have tasted my foot to often). @DrJ / even further OT: Some time ago I coded a test to profile several different but similar solutions to 1 problem. It worked fine on a small data set (bigger then real world), taking only a few moments to execute with nice results. So I increased it to a progressively heavy data set and set the machine crunching away, so I could review the results under different chokes before settling. When the laptop started to overheat ~15min later (high CPU use and lots of swaping etc), the arithmetic of what I had changed finally started catching up to my brain, and I stopped once estimated run time for the new tests exceeded 8 hours and kept rising because of the data to be processed -- and for the first time understood why real work stations are such exquisitely crafted beasts! Some scientific needs for processor time must be insanely heavy loads....
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. |
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The difference between the classical workstations and the "consumer" PC also has narrowed. When I had my Sun (4.3BSD, 20MHz, 16MB memory, 19" screen) the average computer others used was 8086-based, 8MHz, with a 10" to 12" screen, running DOS. The DOS boxes could not even address 16MB memory, let alone use virtual memory. That sort of difference has faded now, though some of the monster 8-core or higher systems come close. Today, if you have a truly huge problem to solve, you do it on a cluster. Ask Oko about that, since he runs computational clusters. |
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I remember those! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
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