LWN: X.org, Distributors, and Proprietary Modules

"X11R7.1 (also known as X.org 7.1) was released back in May. It contains a number of useful new features, better 3D performance on a number of video adapters, and tons of fixes. It is, in general, the platform that X users probably want to be using. This release is not as widely used as it could be, however, and the associated story illustrates one of the costs of proprietary modules.

"One of the developments merged into 7.1 was the AIGLX project, dedicated to the important goal of providing better eye candy for Linux users worldwide. Since this code had gone into the X.org mainline, the Fedora-based AIGLX developers decided that there was no reason to continue to maintain their own version. So the Fedora AIGLX repository stopped seeing updates; Fedora users wanting to use the current AIGLX code could get it straight from X.org 7.1..."

Complete Story

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