[Members] Xorg BoD

[Egbert Eich]

Hi Peter!

I need to split my answer.

Peter Winston writes:
 > 
 > 1) What would you like to see  X, and X.org look like in 3-5 years.
 > 
3 to 5 years is a long time in this industry.

I would like to see the Foundation provide strong support for the
development project:
* As an well known organization it will act as a door opener establishing
  connections to different industry groups that contributors may need
  for their work.
* As an incorporated entity it is member in different industry
  groups such as VESA or khronos and fund these memberships.
* The Foundation will  provide support on legal issues (example:
  straigten out the licensing).
* The Foundation will provide support for X.Org related events
* Technical Workgroups exist which cooperate (sometimes with other
  organizations) on issues like standardization.
* A number of non-development Working Groups will have been established
  to help on things like system and web administration, design, event
  organization etc.
* We will have an active Membership, Members are contributing to both
  development and non-development issues.
However none of this would require a time scale of 3 to 5 years to 
establish.

Technically the pressing needs of today have been concluded:
* The main componentes of the X Window System will be the server
  and a restrucured Xlib together with bindings for extentions
  (generated from protocol descriptions)
  Other components like Xt, Xaw and other libs will still be supported
  and maintained.
* The server will have been restructured to meet the needs of different 
  consumers and different DDXen.
* More of the long known design flaws of the protocol will have been
  addressed while maintaining full backwards compatibility for existing
  applications on the protocol level.
* The x.org DDX has become smaller and supports features of state-of-the
  art hardware better: hot plugging of devices and displays , seamless 
  and dynamically configurable multi monitor support, smart self
  configuration.
* Support for screen and color formats of state of the art hardware
  has been implemented. (The core protocol uses 16bit signed pixel
  addresses with a maximum int depth of 16bit/rgb color)
* Our number of technical contributors has grown. Groups working
  on porting to and supporting of a wider range of different architectures
  exist.
* And of course: we remain fully network transparent!

 > 2) What is the ideal relationship with Freedesktop? 
 > 

This is certainly interesting. So far freedesktop has served as hosting 
and development platform. It has served as a platform where things
could be done on short notice - just by connecting to the admins who
were available most of the time and ready and willing to do reasonable
things. 
X.Org instead had a Board which was unapproachable, the notiton existed
that nothing could be done without endorsement by the Board after
extensive deliberation on one of the weekly telephone conference of 
the Board.

I hope that we will be able to share administration resources between
the two organization and share some of the hosting workload as it was
originally intended. Doing this will allow us to maintain copies of
the data in different geographical regions which will help us to 
ensure availibility, security better desaster recovery.

Cheers,
	Egbert.