Which is the more interesting hackspace: X or Linux?
A curiously interesting thread has sprung up on the Xorg mailing list recently regarding the lack of bandwidth the developers might have for accepting patches. Bernardo Innocenti, who hacks on OLPC stuff amongst other things, wants to get some patches reviewed for acceptance, but there aren't enough people around with the time and inclination to review and accept his work.
He did a quick and dirty analysis of Xorg LoC vs Linux LoC, to give a "X codebase is roughly 1/2 Linux codebase" (which surprised me, actually, I'd always thought it was larger) and then a similarly rough analysis that suggests that Xorg has roughly 1/20th of the developer base.
To some extent Bernardo's metrics are arguable, but the basic facts are that Linux gets the lions share of the developers. Is this what we should expect? Is this a healthy way for the free and open source software community to support the development of what I personally would like to see as the future desktop base?
Linux does a fantastic job as an OS, right now. It's been doing it for years, really, but we still need to get behind some of the differential further up the stack. And all credit to those stalwarts of X development who are shouldering more than their fair share of the burden.
So if you were looking for an open source software project where you can be appreciated, don't overlook X.
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Well, X is a layer one often
Well, X is a layer one often takes for granted, at least as a starting developer
in the open source world.
Besides that one of the reasons might be the lack of documentation at x.org; half of linked wiki-pages haven't been written yet. I'm sure the code is well documented and the documentation is included in the repository, but it should be much easier to grab. The layout is not favorable either, it should include some more links to jump right in it; "Click here to view the latest bugs" or something.
X.org need to make itself more accessible, fun and interesting.
Linux carries a variety of interests
Linux carries a variety of interests, they just all happened to be packaged in one admin level program called the linux kernel. File Systems, Networking, Video, Audio, Radio, Scheduling, theres just a lot of potential topics for Linux to cover. This is lessening as people write things like FUSE to ship out non-performance-critical filesystems into userspace for ease of construction.
In contrast, Xorg is a fairly narrow set of problems. The design of X requires a window manager, but they're all considered seperate programs. So Compiz doesn't count as an Xorg technology, or an Xorg developer. In a way this invalidates the comparison to the linux kernel. Instead you should compare against GNOME, KDE, Apache and other projects where the designs often consider other programs, but don't have the unique OS/userapp distinction that the kernel features.
To make things worse, a lot of times the Xorg drivers are abandoned by users (a fraction of which are your potential new developers) in favor of propriety 3d drivers. Does the data show that new projects like nouveau are moving the developer:code ratio in the right direction?
Drivers for more devices, strangled community
The impact of the dev community stranglement that xfree applied are probably still affecting x.org. Is anyone tracking number committers in the tree since x.org forked off?
Also, of the LoC metrics included drivers - hell, the kernel deals with larger number and variety of hw.
kernels have more general applications
Almost everybody needs a kernel. Not everybody needs X. If the kernel doesn't work well, X suffers. If X doesn't work well, some uses of the kernel suffer, but servers and embedded systems, for example, may not be affected much.
But the difference may still be way out of whack with what's reasonable, and it's of course good to hear people thinking about how to attract more X development....