I just got the message on all the bug reports that the DirectFB backend is being removed for 3.0.
First you waited too long to do it. I'm glad its finally removed. I tried to do the build and they will come approach hoping that if a decent port was resurrected a community would form. Well they did not come and its too big of a project to try and do in your spare time. This is just one of those things that happens in opensource but I have to think that its also a failure of the embedded community which was the primary user. Perhaps I'll get flamed for this but so what. In my years of working on embedded linux I've seen the embedded community do and awful lot of taking from the opensource community and very little in the way of giving back. Perhaps the decision to remove DirectFB support can serve is a bit of a wake up call that you can't take forever. Kudo's for making the decision it needed to be done a long time ago. I kept hoping someone would step up and support it and never managed to give up. As I said if your and company making embedded products based on open source its time to finally start thinking about giving back and stop only taking. And thats not just patches here and there but fundamental support if you want to see the opensource continue to be valuable. And yes there have been valuable contributions I'm not disputing that but software regardless of if its open or closed source needs continuous support to thrive and grow that was not provided for DirectFB and indeed for a multitude of open source projects used in the embedded world. The DirectFB port died because the embedded community itself has problems and I suspect unless things change it won't be the last project that eventually becomes difficult to use in the embedded world if the community continues to fail to support opensource. Am I sad yes I put a lot of work in it. Am I angry not really just resigned to long haul I love both embedded programming and open source so I'm committed, just I recognize that its a slow and painful process in this community to build a solid opensource foundation. _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
