companies contributing to X [was: Re: Respository vandalism by root at ...fd.o]

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 02:56:32PM -0700, Matt Dew wrote:

> This I'm curious about.   Are there more companies that feel it's
> too-hard/not-worth-while for companies to contribute stuff to Xorg?
> I know the linux kernel has this issue, but is X's contribution
> difficulty larger?

I think X faces the problem that our approach to code quality is pretty 
similar to the kernel, but the number of skilled coders with domain 
experience is much smaller. There's a pretty strong cultural mismatch 
between our willingness to accept patches and people's willingness to 
submit them. Vendors are willing to argue that their component suppliers 
have in-kernel drivers, but X.org's modular development model makes it 
far easier for those suppliers to argue that an "out of tree" X driver 
is equivalent to something that's maintained within X.org.

The unsurprising outcome is that drivers in X.org only tend to be 
regularly updated if they have someone who can work with the X.org 
community. If they don't, it's far easier to keep the code in their own 
tree. Working out ways to improve this situation would seem worthwhile, 
but simply being more enthusiastic about accepting contributions doesn't 
seem like a great plan (compare the code quality of nouveau, intel and 
radeon to that of some of the out of tree drivers, for instance)

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org