From: Rodolphe Ortalo <Rodolphe.Ortalo@cert.fr>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 11:50:52 +0200

Re: Regarding GGI and Xfree 4.0

Hello,

well, concerning this relationship between GGI and XFree
(especially in its 4.0 incarnation), I 'd like to drop a long
note. [3]

I happen to be in contact with a long-time member of the
XFree team which if one the system admin. of the laboratory
in which in spent 4 years for my Ph.D. preparation. (LAAS)
IIRC, Matthieu Herrb, to name it, is the OpenBSD (or is it
NetBSD ?) maintainer of the XFree server.

He's a nice and very competent guy so we had various exchanges,
most of the time _without_ any relation with graphic issues at all.
But of course, given our personal involvements we talked and
argued a little over the GGI issues, or the XFree things...
(Lock one XFree and one GGI programmer in a room, and
guess what they'll talk about after two hours.... ;-) Even if
they had other things to talk about before... :-))

I noticed primarily (and Matthieu confirmed that) that
some common misconceptions concerning GGI do also
exist among XFree contributors. We may think sometimes
that these people, being aware of the technical intricacies,
have intuitively a better view of the GGI project. But that's
not particularly the case: they have a lot of things to do to
support the XFree project, they don't have time to monitor
the GGI work, they hear the same rumors and flames as an
average non-technical internet surfer, and they end with
the same a-priori. [2]

Of course, given their technical background, these people
can catch up much faster than the average mailing-list reader.
They may not agree with GGI design issues, they may even
be right [1].
But they would surely be happy to have more productive
exchanges with another team of free-software developers
that happen to work on similar problems (especially as
we have _different_ views: this could be very creative,
even though it also raises problems).

The main thing that prevent such exchanges is time.
As usual.
The second one is probably these misconceptions
concerning the aim, contributors, and development
plan of the GGI project. These things can be corrected
easily by communicating clearly, like Jon did in his
last mail on this subject. I think we should propagate
such clear statements (information statements) from
the GGI project leader 4-5 times per year to other
project discussion lists. (Things like: advancement notes.)
Just for PR. But I think these mails should come only from
GGI leaders main contributors (Andreas, Steffen, Jon,
Markus, etc.) .

If these false thoughts are corrected, I really think that
the relation between the XFree team and GGI can be
at least friendly, and eventually productive. And note
that I have an example... (But a purely french one: so
the emphasis was on friendship and all these sort of
things...)

Rodolphe

[1] And, frankly, with Matthieu, we finally reformulated
the core technical question in ways that are very different from
one could expect - something that has really nothing in common
with some ioctl vs. userspace lib. performance pseudo-
controversy.

[2] A perfect example: do you know what Matthieu thought
about EvStacks ? He thought it was a joke. I mean a _real_
joke ! (And that's right, we had a lot of fun with this thing. I
don't remember why - but discussions around these subject
were always turning to funny style. Pretty cool btw imho.)
Apart from that, guess what ? Of course, he would design it
somehow differently (he has a strong BSD past), but globally,
he thinks that's the way to go. And now, the final quote "but
you may have a very hard time trying to have that accepted in
the Linux kernel". He said that in early 1999 ! Of course, I told
him that we know that pretty well, since 1997...

[3] it should have been 'short' originally, but well, you know...