DF: Good morning. Sorry for being late in returning to our discussion today I was working on my fantasy novel.
JW: I used to read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. Haven't had much time lately though.
DW: I'm working on a little Fantasy/Psychological Horror novel, the plots worked out long ago, just attempting the first write up.
JW: Nice. When I was younger, the Lord of the Rings trilogy really swept me off my feet. More recently, the Illuminatus! trilogy made me feel like I knew what it was like to have an acid trip.
DF: I haven't read the Illuminatus! trilogy, if its that good I'll have to.
JW: Yes, the Illuminatus! trilogy really blew my mind. The facts were all false, but despite that, the book was truer to reality than any other book I've read.
DF: What's the plot?
JW: It has so MANY plots... I don't know where to start in describing it.
DF: I'll have to get a copy when I finish this book and (hopefully) make a small fortune. Until then I'm poor.
JW: Yeah, or get it from the library, it's a classic, written about 20 years after Lord of the Rings.
DF: That is an idea, been forever since I visited the library. My local one doesn't have anything good there and it takes them a fortnight to order it in. And I lost interest because the bookshop around the corner has better books in stock, and can order them in less time. So I'm sitting here with the guy who would implement X16 a decade before we're done with X11 and I'm discussing fantasy literature.
JW: Everything is a fantasy of one sort or another. But some fantasies actually have a chance at becoming real. Heck, after a couple years, Xouvert may participate in standards efforts to design "X12".
DF: There is the question of whether it matters.
JW: To people who want smooth, fast desktops, it matters. To people who want glitzy graphics and nice looking/acting/feeling games, it matters.
DF: I mean with open X11 and BSD style licensees your pretty much setting an open standard with or without a standards body.
JW: So when the day comes, Xouvert will be 'the X12' implementation. But first we need to figure out what X12 is. It won't be a radical change to X11, just a rebalancing. In fact, the X11 protocol, with its extensions, is so flexible that I suspect we won't need to jettison backward support for X11 at all; all that's needed is to add "extensions" one piece at a time, and rewrite our core apps to use them, and not use the deprecated features. Then over time, other apps can get rewritten to use the newer, whizzier extensions and abandon the crufty old ways of coding to X11 protocol. X11 is a general enough protocol, like TCP/IP, that you can invent a web server or ftp server to run over it, without having to change the protocol. Hence, backwards compatibility never need be an issue as we move forward into the future.
DF: something needs to be done with it though if open source wants to compete on the desktop, OS X is beautiful to behold already, and even Microsoft seems to be ahead at the moment from the reports of longhorns new graphics core the video's suggest its very fast and powerful.
JW: I think the KDE and GNOME teams are working very hard to make a desktop that not only competes, but far outstrips OS X and Aqua. Smaller teams and individuals are also privately working to get us toward that goal. "Pogo" is a good example, you can check it out on Savannah and Freshmeat. As KDE and GNOME find things they need in the X server, Xouvert will be here to stand and assist them. Neither of us working alone can achieve a beautiful, modern desktop. It takes all of us.
DF: You're fun to talk with, what do you like to be called?
JW: Jonathan.
DF: A pleasure meeting you Jonathan.
JW: Likewise it has been enjoyable meeting you. Our website has gotten more than 90,000 unique hits from slashdot over the past few days.
DF: And OSNews and other places. Who is hosting you? It must be expensive.
JW: I'm not sure what the hosting cost is. Webspace is donated by a very good friend of mine, John Sokol. John Sokol was one of the original 386BSD developers, before it was branched to become FreeBSD and NetBSD. It is a sad thing that all his credits in the code got taken out, over the years.
DF: Its sad that *BSD is as low profile as it is.
JW: John continues to do amazing things with BSD, especially in the area of
video streaming and compression. Being Canadian, I supported OpenBSD just to be
patriotic. But after I used it a bit, I realized it is actually much nicer than
the other distributions of BSD and Linux. It is small, tight, and has no bloat.
The security is what really sold me on OpenBSD though.
Interview conducted by David Ford, a freelance writer. He is looking for work
while also creating a chat empire over at P10Link.net.
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