Why Compiz?

[el_zahr]

That.. Why I should use Compiz and not Beryl?
or.. Why I should use Beryl and not compiz?? :twisted:
I just want to know the differences...

PD: sorry my english.. :oops:

[imnotpc]

el_zahr, your English is fine; don't worry about it. This is a tricky question, not because it's difficult to answer, but because it's important to keep facts and opinions separate. I will try my best and hope that the Beryl users who read this will contribute as well.

I'm not qualified to discuss the technical differences, but I'll list a few points about the communities.

1. Compiz has roughly the same number of developers as Beryl. One major difference is our lead developer is David Reveman who wrote xgl and Compiz and continues to actively develop Compiz.

2. The Beryl community is much larger than Compiz and is growing much faster due to the "buzz" around Beryl right now.

3. Most of the active members of the Compiz community are active IT professionals. This gives our site a very business-like atmosphere. A very large number of Beryl members are teenage students and their site has a casual "clannish" atmosphere. My opinion is that we need to make our forum a little more fun and Beryl mods need to crack down on flaming and enforce good forum etiquette on some of their enthusiast members.

I encourage both Compiz and Beryl members to add to this thread. Once the thread has run it's course I'll summarize the facts into a FAQ for the site.

[el_zahr]

Do you believe that the beryl and compiz developers will join and work together??
I think that we are losing a lot of time because the two communities are working on the same things and its not very productive..

ehmmm.. i'm an active member of the beryl forum (and I use beryl, because was the first option which I find by google) , but i wanted to know what the compiz users think about it..

[amgeex]

Well, the two communities are not working on the same things. Beryl creates their own set of plugins with fancy effects and stuff like the snow plugin. We just port those plugins, not rewrite them.

The official Compiz developers create the very core of compiz, fixing bugs, adding new features, improving the overall program, etc. Beryl developers take this improvements and implement them into Beryl. You see, its more of a symbiotic relationship than a competition.

[mikedee]

At the moment here are the major differences as far as the user is concerned.

1. Beryl has blurfx plugin, compiz doesn't (well it does but it doesnt work properly)
2. Compiz has Border, Copacity, Dock, Miniwin, Mouse Gestures, Wallpaper, Cheat Sheet and Scripting plugins, beryl doesn't
3. Beryl is configured with bsm. Compiz is configured with either the gnome app from gandalfin or zootreeves new configuration utility, or directly in gconf. Both sides are working on a user friendly configuration app. Beryl uses a combination of libberylsettings and python bindings. Compiz uses the dbus plugin. In my technical opinion libberylsettings will cause a lot of problems in the future whilst dbus will remain bug free.
4. In my tests beryl was slower, but your mileage may vary.

So at the moment the difference is fairly small (except for the extra plugins). My opinion is that the difference is that we will get all of Davids new changes before beryl so from now on we will move much quicker (David is putting in a lot of effort these days).

There are a lot of code differences in beryl which seem strange to me (and David too). They are normally things that have been added to beryl because their developers do not know compiz well enough to do what they want. Two particular examples are the extra defines for the window borders and for painting bottom to top. The bottom to top changes were recent and actually mean that beryl is slower for no reason.

See this post for more info, if you are not technical then I am afraid you will need to trust me, but all I can say is watch this space for the next 6 months and you will see some incredible things :)

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-December/000989.html

[imnotpc]

Do you believe that the beryl and compiz developers will join and work together??
I think that we are losing a lot of time because the two communities are working on the same things and its not very productive..
OK, this *is* a difficult question since no one person can speak for a group of developers. Based on what I know and what I read on the forums I think the Compiz and Beryl developers have substantially different development styles. David and the Compiz devs communicate mainly through the mailing list and use a more traditional, methodical development process where patches are submitted, reviewed by David, then either accepted, modified and accepted, rejected with suggestions on how to fix or improve the code, or rejected outright because the code conflicts with the project's direction, is too buggy, or adds a feature that has little or no benefit. Quinn and the Beryl devs communicate mainly on IRC and have a more fast paced "Let's get it done" style. Because of this I personally don't believe the devs will ever get closer than they are now, but since they mostly work on different projects I don't think it's a big deal.

I see a much bigger loss in the time and effort we are spending setting up a new community. All that effort could have gone into improving the original site. Another big loss is all the confusion and time spent by users and distros trying to figure out which project is right for them. Unfortunately I don't see any way to avoid this.

[mikedee]

Do you believe that the beryl and compiz developers will join and work together??

The major problem here is to do with the licencing change that Quinn introduced in beryl, she changed it so that everything must be GPL in the beryl tree.

we owe a lot to upstream, but not enough to change our license. If upstream were arranged in such a way as to accept GPL'd patches, then we'd be far more amiable to the idea of sending them.

As far as I know she is technically wrong, they can submit patches as long as the developer that wrote the patch submits it. I technically cannot take patches from Beryl core and apply them to Compiz because that would be breaking their copyright.

So, Beryl devs will never send any fixes or improvements to Compiz but they take and relicence and changes and fixes that Compiz (David) does.

So Compiz developers are working with Beryl devs, but the Beryl devs are not sending back anything.

[onestone]

mikedee: You are right that you can't use beryl code directly. But if someone of us would get a mail of david or of a compiz developer that does not critizise beryl every day, there should be no problems with relicenseing of some of our patches.

[nesnomis]

It is an interresting question.... I think the anwser is more emotional than technical.... though from a technical view there is no doubt Compiz is the choice.... ;-) ... Why do most people choose beryl then? I think it is a combination of myths and ideas 'that people like'... first of all Quinnstorm was said to be a girl (in some sense i soppose that is true!?!).... secondly, they said that compiz was developing slowly and would'nt include there improvements, worst of all "sponsored by a big company". So they forked the project, and the general public idea is.... Compiz is not being developed, beryl is the developer continuing the project... and so on....

Maybe not the answer to the question, but my opinion in why some projects are praised and some are hidden away... I guess most popular or biggest project is not allways the same as the best, but more a question of attitude and what you have heard..... :? .... i think everyone should should ask your question to themselves instead.... why do i use this or that!? ....

[mikedee]

First off, thanks for taking the time to answer your critics and welcome :)

Nobody here speaks for the compiz developers because we are not the compiz developers. There is only one compiz developer.

David is more than happy to look at patches that he is sent and as far as I know he has never said a bad word against anyone. Here are some important posts from him on the mailing lists which explains a few things.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-October/000578.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-July/000315.html

My feeling is that the people behind the beryl fork never really tried
to work with me and the fdo version of compiz. Here's a copy of one of
the initial email replies I got from Quinn back in March this year:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, I can certainly post my changes to the list (I don't really work
in patches, I just keep a source tree around), and as for moving
discussion there, really our work in a forum works better for
us...maybe we need a compiz forum somewhere.

So as you see, initially there was no patches sent. As time went on, many patches are committed to compiz-quinn, some good some bad. The cvs wasn't and isnt being maintained properly in that multiple patches are submitted in one revision.

This makes it very hard to pull one patch from another and the time taken fishing through source to find the differences is greater than the time to just fix the initial bug.

Submit patches to the mailing list and see if they are accepted or not, many people on this forum and on the mailing list have done exactly that. Why should beryl developers be different?

All of these rules ONLY apply to the core and plugins which he wrote and distribute with the core. Any other plugins can do whatever they like, they do not have to be approved by him.

[Guest]

It's very hard to give a balanced view on this because I'm not exactly a fan of the beryl project. But I'll Do my best to sum up the differences as I see them, ignoring all the politics involved with the fork.

Beryl Beryl is developed by the community, led by QuinnStorm who developed most of the beryl plugins/apps (although nowadays she seems to be slightly less involved, probably due to the fact she now has a job) . A lot of new development is taken from compiz
Beryl is less strict over the quality of it's code and will often include 'hacks' in the code to get new features fast.
Most beryl development goes into plugins, the core is changed when plugins require it to be changed.
Beryl development is much more focused on pleasing the community and since most of the beryl community is quite young this means eye candy
Most development discussion is done on IRC #beryl-dev
Beryl is easier to install
Beryl has more eyecandy enabled by default
Beryl uses flat text files to store it's settings, accessible for developers through libberylsettings
Beryl is normally configured through beryl-settings, which has a complex interface.
Beryl has a larger community mainly due the fact that everyone using compiz before the fork used to visit the same forum which then became the beryl forum (without any notice that compiz still existed)
The beryl website is hosted by the community
Beryl has emerald which allows you to theme your windows, It can also run the compiz window decorator (renamed helidor in beryl)
Beryl has the blurfx plugin which compiz does not
Beryl is GPLCompiz Compiz Is mostly developed by one person, David Reveman who is a professional employed by novell.
David is very strict about what code goes into compiz and ensures everything is high quality, this can mean compiz misses out on the latest features (e.g. blurfx) and will wait for 'proper' solutions to be implemented.
Development is mostly focused on the core, plugins are secondary
Most development discussion is done on the compiz mailing list
Compiz often more difficult to install because different things have to be installed from different places, It's not like beryl where there is a central repository where everything can be installed from.
Compiz is more stable and smoother for most people
Compiz has less eyecandy enabled by default, this has lead many people to believe that compiz has less eyecandy which is not true
Compiz uses metacity themes
Compiz at present only has one settings backend, gconf, which is accessible for developers through dbus.
Compiz can be configured through gnome-compiz-manager, compiz-settings or directly through gconf-editor
Compiz has extra plugins, mousegestures, cheatsheet, scripting plugin, border and some others (mikedee has listed them above)
Compiz is MIT
The compiz website is hosted by Novell

Most of these points have already been mentioned, I'm sure there other things I have missed, but thats all I can think of at the moment.

[cyberorg]

Zootreeves summarized it quite well.

One thing I would correct though:

Compiz often more difficult to install because different things have to be installed from different places, It's not like beryl where there is a central repository where everything can be installed from.

Depends on the distribution you are using. For openSUSE Compiz, Compiz extra plugins, gnome-compiz-manager from Gandalfn and all of the beryl packages are available from the same repository and are as easy to install as any other package.

I would advise users to not look for the theoretical/hypothetical/guessed differences.

Proof of the pudding is in eating, so get both installed and use the one you like most/serves your purpose.

[mikedee]

The compiz website is hosted by Novell


As far as I know this is a common misconception. The git repositories, mailing list and releases are hosted on freedesktop.org. This forum as far as I know is hosted outside of Novell.

These forums are hosted by Dream Host which I do not think is owned by Novell.

[imnotpc]

This forum as far as I know is hosted outside of Novell.

These forums are hosted by Dream Host which I do not think is owned by Novell.

Correct. The main site(wiki) and forums are on a DreamHost server although I just learned that the forum backend is on another server. Also, David is setting up a git server on DreamHost and I'm trying to help. I can get the repo working easy enough, but I haven't got gitweb working yet. Unfotunately my dad passed away on Saturday so I don't have a lot of time to work in this right now. If anyone is familiar with gitweb I could use a little help with this. I don't want to take this thread OT so just contact me directly.

[Kristian]

Edited by zootreeves ** Leave the flame wars to the beryl forum

[watkin5]

So please stop this "OMG DAVID IS TEH BOMB! HE IS TEH LEETEST CODER EVAH!"
Are we reading the same thread here?
I don't see where you coming from.

[imnotpc]

Kristian, something tells me you're not going to be getting a Christmas card from David this year. Seriously, take a couple days off and get some sleep. Then come back and make your point in a rational, factual manner without ranting and personal attacks.

Jeff

[Kristian]

Ok, so it's ok for compiz-people to post BLATANT LIES but I can't exagerate a bit to make a point? Get over yourself zootreeves. If you can't read enough between the lines to tell that all of this is not meant to be taken entierly serious, then you have a problem. I'm reposting this because I feel it makes a very important point which is otherwise completly ignored.

I think it's interesting that the moment someone criticises your hero, he gets his post deleted/edited to oblivion. If you're gonna delete my post, delete everyone refferencing to it too. Thank you for proving my point though.

Here's the original "scandalous" post, for reference:


Ok, I've been trying to stay out of this "flame war" or whatever you wish to call it for long enough. The attitude of some of the compiz people annoy me greatly. And this is it, I've had it.

They seem to think what David does is good, when his code is, in fact, crap.

Yes, there, I said it. David can't code for shit.

He can make things work, yes, but his code is some of the ugliest code I have ever layed my eyes on. Functions spanning 800+ lines with 20-30 variables. ZERO COMMENTS. Enormous (undocumented) core structs. EXTREME amounts of code duplication. So much nesting that if you're using a standard sized terminal, you'll be left with less than one character per line. Not to mention how hard it is to track the code path with such code.

David might be stricter with what patches he applies from external sources, but that doesn't stop him from applying his own code, which is so ugly that it makes most people sick.

People who worship David's "clean code" obviously know nothing of clean code. So please stop this "OMG DAVID IS TEH BOMB! HE IS TEH LEETEST CODER EVAH!" Just because you don't know how to program yourself either.

So please, before you compiz fanboys start worshipping the proffesionalism(is that even a word?) of compiz, take a look at the code that's actually used. It's not proffesional, it's made in a rather amateur way.

In fact, let me rephrase my claims a bit: David can create programs, but he can't write code. Specially not C. It's because of code like that which he puts out that proprietary code exist, to spare sane people from reading such an ugly mess. Please; relicense compiz to something even more restrictive so this abuse of the C programming language can stop.

What, ungratefull am I? Why is that do you think? It's not because of David, but because his fan boys refuse to see how bad his code is. The guy has potential, he has a lot of knowledge about X, Xgl, OpenGL, window managers and a lot more that I don't belive any Beryl has, but that still doesn't mean his code is clean. So stop telling him GREAT WORK! and start giving him some constructive critisim instead. And for the love of god, stop claiming his code has higher standard than beryl code. It doesn't.

And sure, Beryl will implement methods that aren't ideal, but when we do, they are optional. How is that bad? Isn't it better to have something that works now which you can choose not to use, over not having it at all? I fail to see the problem.

[amgeex]

Hey guys, chill a bit. This is not a war you know, if you don't want to use Compiz because you don't like David's code then its ok, don't use it, no one is stopping you. I guess that if you want David to read your post you should email him directly, because he doesn't dwell here too much.

Still, I can't recall reading your post anywhere on this forums, so maybe you're mistaken when you say we deleted it? Anyway, maybe it got lost when the forum moved domains. If we in fact deleted your post, let me apologize, it won't happen again. :D

[Kristian]

I'd also like an explanation of how a function pointer works, why goto is mostly bad but not allways and what O(1) means from anyone trying to answer my post. If you can't answer all of those questions without looking it up, you have no right commenting on other peoples code and wether it is good or not.

Yes, I am ranting, and why? Because I am tierd of the kiss-and-smile attitude Beryl people are expected to have, yet people like mikedee is found trolling around the Beryl forums takeing potshots at Beryl at any oppertunity he gets, carefull not to get too obvious.

I don't do shit like that, if I'm gonna say something I'll say it straigth to your face with no bullshit. I also like the power of exageration becasue most people don't get it if you try beeing nice and polite. I'm not rational you say? Please, did I hurt your feelings by not trying to be a sly lier but rather say what I had on my heart? Get over yourself. Not everyone prefers beeing a slick, sly, lying, clueless idiot like mikedee. I prefer beeing a straigth up idiot, it's much more efficient as it tells people what I mean, how strongly I mean it, and also points out that while what I write is not meant ironicly, it is meant to be an exageration. USUALLY when you deal with intelligent people, they will catch on to the sarcasm right away, while those who are less fortunant tend to be a bit slower on the uptake, and the "funny" gets lost.

Now would you like to start a real dialouge? Then start by aplogising to everyone working on Beryl about the insults made towards our quality of code. It's not any better or worse than what David puts out.

And about Beryl not giving back to compiz... I happen to be a firm beliver in the GPL and when people like mikedee makes sure his code can't be used in Beryl, how is that supposed to help us cooperate? And also, if you want to use Beryl code, it is FREE SOFTWARE. Feel free to use anything you want according to the license, which just so happens to be the most used free software license in the world. If compiz wants to use a diffrent license, isn't that a problem on your behalf, not Beryl?

All Beryl developers I know are actually friendly against compiz, including me. We want to cooperate, but when we are called thiefs and people claim we do nothing but "steal" from compiz, it's not exactly encouraging cooperation. And when the compiz-community also takes on a "we are better than you" attitude whenever possible, it also gets kinda anoying. I, for one, will not bend over just in the name of "friendly" cooperation.

Start looking at yourself before you bitch at the Beryl project about how bad we are and how little we cooperate.

Also, are anyone actually going to answer this with any good posts, or just "OMG I have no idea what he just wrote, but he is not worshipping compiz and God (David), so he must be insane!" ? I dare you to prove me wrong, that will at least get a gloves-off conversation going.

[Kristian]

Hey guys, chill a bit. This is not a war you know, if you don't want to use Compiz because you don't like David's code then its ok, don't use it, no one is stopping you. I guess that if you want David to read your post you should email him directly, because he doesn't dwell here too much.

Still, I can't recall reading your post anywhere on this forums, so maybe you're mistaken when you say we deleted it? Anyway, maybe it got lost when the forum moved domains. If we in fact deleted your post, let me apologize, it won't happen again. :D

Read on the previous page, zootreves removed the content.

[Kristian]

http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1073&start=30

Please zootreves, take a look at that post and tell me if I'm out of line or not.

[mikedee]

Perhaps you could answer one of my points with some actual facts or examples. I always try to make a valid point, so that if I have something wrong then people can correct me.

So far you are the first person in over 6 months to even entertain a technical conversation. If you could maybe point out some factual examples of bad compiz code then we could get somewhere.

I have plenty of examples of bad code DESIGN. You seem to be a very knowledgeable coder, so maybe you could have a look at the settings code, IPCS, the 'slowness fix' hack. Maybe you explain how beryl has those things right.

After that you could explain Davids queries on this post to explain what the difference between PAINT_SCREEN_ORDER_BACK_TO_FRONT_MASK and PAINT_SCREEN_WITH_TRANSFORMED_WINDOWS_MASK. They appear to work identically.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-December/000989.html

Also please look through all the settings code and then imaging that another CompOptionType was added (eg. CompOptionTypeImage). How many different parts of the code would need to be changed? Experienced coders write code which will be maintainable.

Whilst you are there you could explain why there are no less than 3 different ways for plugins to communicate. Do you not agree that you should reduce the number of possible code paths rather than increase it?

Now to the more simple asthetic code problems. Why does IPCS break all of the compiz coding style? Why does none of the code that Quinn writes have any spaces in it?

Thanks for pointing out your response to my comment. I actually spent time showing specific examples, you responded with an insult. Good way to prove your intelligence.

[iznogood]

Kristian hi,

i totally agree with you. DAVID's CODE IS SHIT HE CAN NOT CODE A SINGLE LINE, YES YOU ARE RIGHT!!! OK before my post is deleted let me finish it please...

I haven't coded much for compiz and nothing for beryl...
I do not like C, i prefer C++. I hate macros and untyped shit...I like my code clean sructured and well commented. I work for a rather large software house implementing an ERP with well over 5 million lines of code in at least 3 languages(Delphi, PL/SQL and scripts) and this is how we do it there.
And yes i feel a bit uncomfortable around here since i am a newbie

Also have another great problem... I would like to see compiz implemented in C++ with beautiful objects and abstraction, inheritance and such. I hate it when all these pointers are just passed around and no properties , getters, setters, encapsulation and such exists.
What can i do, i am used in different methods of software engineering...I know that many people from beryl would like that( There where a few posts in the past)

So if you are(all of you) such great developers why don't you do it???
Why criticising other people's work when YOU HAVE NO ORIGINAL IDEAS except a few plugins. Yes people of compiz are few but we respect the work of others. David provides all the tools that you work, don't you dare criticise him, otherwise (if you have the balls) write your own original composite manager, why not in C++....Even better i would like Xegl and fast please, because i would like to rub it on my (window) friends face...
He wrote Xgl so i guess it would not be to difficult for you guys, right???

You are 20 (as Quinn says) developers. I have no reason to believe otherwise. However many plugins are unmaintained, not working etc...
Put your talents in good use and stop posting here... You have your forums with 2000 or more members, so what are you doing here in this small forum with 250 menbers?? Haven't this stupid fork done enough damage except providing a new game for some(and an opportunity to be famous and find a job maybe???)

I have stopped posting at beryl, others have done the same, please leave us alone. I have nothing against you but i find all these unnecessary

Unless you have something useful (about coding) to say then please stop

[mikedee]

And about Beryl not giving back to compiz... I happen to be a firm beliver in the GPL and when people like mikedee makes sure his code can't be used in Beryl, how is that supposed to help us cooperate? And also, if you want to use Beryl code, it is FREE SOFTWARE. Feel free to use anything you want according to the license, which just so happens to be the most used free software license in the world. If compiz wants to use a diffrent license, isn't that a problem on your behalf, not Beryl?

You might not remember, but it was beryl that started playing games with licences. It is not my fault that you did not read the rule book properly. You seem to totally misunderstand how the GPL applies since you think that if Compiz loads GPL plugins then every other plugin must be GPL too.

And also, if you want to use my plugin code, it is FREE SOFTWARE. Feel free to use anything you want according to the license, which just so happens to be the licence used by the most popular free browser in the world. If beryl wants to use a diffrent license, isn't that a problem on your behalf, not Compiz?

[iznogood]

Hey mikedee,

i saw a few posts from you at a beryl thread ...
What are you doing there man?? Don't you had enough of this ??
Stop it you are provoking people, and you are needed here...
Don't waste time, there is no need to continue all this...
There are many things to be done so lets get on with them...

[Kristian]

First: Thank you for a proper response. I appreciate it.


So if you are(all of you) such great developers why don't you do it???
Why criticising other people's work when YOU HAVE NO ORIGINAL IDEAS except a few plugins. Yes people of compiz are few but we respect the work of others. David provides all the tools that you work, don't you dare criticise him, otherwise (if you have the balls) write your own original composite manager, why not in C++....
First and foremost because I don't get payed for this, and so it would take me a quite some time. I have, however, considered doing exactly this; makeing a compositing window manager from scratch. That's how unhappy I have been with what I see in both Compiz and Beryl.

However, I have decided that for now, with my knowledge of X and X-related programming, it would take me far too much time to be fun. I will reconsider this when I see what happens with 0.2.0.

Also, the whole "makeing the wheel twice"-thing is something I've never been a big fan of.

Even better i would like Xegl and fast please, because i would like to rub it on my (window) friends face...
He wrote Xgl so i guess it would not be to difficult for you guys, right???
Like I pointed out in both my posts: It is obvious that David knows a log about X and X-related programming. This knowledge combined with the time it takes to utilize it probably doesn't exist in Beryl in a single person.

You are 20 (as Quinn says) developers. I have no reason to believe otherwise. However many plugins are unmaintained, not working etc...
Put your talents in good use and stop posting here...
Which plugins don't work, which aren't maintained, which aren't working. Please enlighten me. Also, I think it's important to point out that all Beryl developers are doing this development on their spare time. Some are more active than others.

You have your forums with 2000 or more members, so what are you doing here in this small forum with 250 menbers?? Haven't this stupid fork done enough damage except providing a new game for some(and an opportunity to be famous and find a job maybe???)
Isn't that a bit of a moot point considering mikedee is constantly bringing up compiz in the Beryl forum? And this is a thread about Beryl AND Compiz? I am trying to create a dialogue by screaming out loud what a lot of people have been thinking.

I have stopped posting at beryl, others have done the same, please leave us alone. I have nothing against you but i find all these unnecessary

Unless you have something useful (about coding) to say then please stop

Check my post count, I have only ever posted in this thread. And that's with a very honest motive. Yet other compiz people don't act like you, and these are the people that annoy me the most. I am posting here because they are posting at our forum, and I felt none of the other posts by beryl-people here had enough of a punch.

Again: Thank you for actually makeing an attempt at answering.

[amgeex]

Alright. First, Kristian, I apologize again for your post deletion. Zootreves shouldn't have done it. Now I ask you all, as a Moderator, to not use foul language. I assume that you are all adults and mature people who do not need of insults and personal attacks to prove your point. Please keep those thoughts to yourself. If not I WILL go in your posts and edit them, but not delete them, don't worry. :roll:

[Kristian]

You might not remember, but it was beryl that started playing games with licences. It is not my fault that you did not read the rule book properly. You seem to totally misunderstand how the GPL applies since you think that if Compiz loads GPL plugins then every other plugin must be GPL too.

If you read the rest of that post you would realise that I think GPL is the best license available. We haven't complained about not beeing able to use compiz code, have we? You, however, bring this up all the time. If compiz really wanted to use Beryl core, all they would have to do was to use the industry standard license for Free Software.

And also, if you want to use my plugin code, it is FREE SOFTWARE. Feel free to use anything you want according to the license, which just so happens to be the licence used by the most popular free browser in the world. If beryl wants to use a diffrent license, isn't that a problem on your behalf, not Compiz?
Anyone who knows how you act knows why you selected the license you did. Stop pretending we don't. Any further discussion of this will be ignored on my behalf.

[mikedee]

Anyone who knows how you act knows why you selected the license you did. Stop pretending we don't. Any further discussion of this will be ignored on my behalf.

Good, thanks

Could you get onto the code questions now please

[Guest]

We want to cooperate, but when we are called thiefs and people claim we do nothing but "steal" from compiz, it's not exactly encouraging cooperation. And when the compiz-community also takes on a "we are better than you" attitude whenever possible, it also gets kinda anoying.

If you want to cooperate and are so friendly then how come when David accidentally include the wrong header in his kde decorator there was hell on within minutes of the release. You were emailing the Free Software Foundation, contacting lawyers and here's a quote from one of your developers.

** hacks into the compiz repository and deletes all the code, and the entire repo so that no revisions can be retrieved, then uses a non existant program to delete the copies off of everyone's harddrives.

Is this a 'friendly fork'?

Kristian as I said when i moderated your first post leave the flames to the beryl forum where they belong. It's upto your mods to clean up your forum, do not bring it here. Any more and I'll ban you, fine you can post criticisms but do it in a more friendly manner, I do not want this kind of stuff on the forum.

I'm sick of discussing this subject, can we just leave it please...

[Kristian]

If you want to cooperate and are so friendly then how come when David accidentally include the wrong header in his kde decorator there was hell on within minutes of the release. You were emailing the Free Software Foundation, contacting lawyers and here's a quote from one of your developers.

** hacks into the compiz repository and deletes all the code, and the entire repo so that no revisions can be retrieved, then uses a non existant program to delete the copies off of everyone's harddrives.

Is this a 'friendly fork'?

That was a bit of a tasteless remark indeed. I belive it might've been taken out of proportion since it turned out to only be a mistake. We all make mistakes, I can't take back what someone else said, but belive me, if I could, I would.

But what I'm trying to say is that friendship is a two-way thing. Have your devs stop hammering our forum, and let's coordinate our "what is the difference between compiz and beryl" attitude. A fork doesn't have to be a bad thing. Let's look at what I consider to be facts:

- Beryl has a lot of creative plugin people. A few very skilled "core" developers. Beryl don't mind testing unconventional things.
- Beryl has a large but slightly childish community. This community has tons of crazy and a good amount of sane ideas.
- Beryl has not yet made a stable release.
- Compiz has a tight community with a few very resourcefull people.
- Compiz was here first. Compiz is the original.
- Compiz has a few highly knowledgeable people, probably more so than the Beryl Project.
- Both projects suffer because the code is a mess.
- The code is not documented.

The last two points go for BOTH projects. We can either fight over wether these points are true or not, or try to work with them. We can't change the size or maturity of either cummunity, we can however, try to be honest with eachother. The fork is a fact, it has come to stay, let us get the validity of a fork out of the way to begin with.

The split has not been a good one, I would have to say. There is way too much hostility. Maybe in the ideal world there wouldn't have been a fork at all, but there is and that's what we have to work with.

If I am so mistaken as some claim about the licensing issues, please explain to me how my current plugin and future plugins can easily flow freely between compiz and beryl. As long as my plugin remains GPL, I have no problem sharing it of course. I will even help if there needs to be done some partial rewriting.

As for core-patches this is much harder to work with because the code can be quite different even if the majority is the same. But let's start with what CAN be worked around.

[nesnomis]

Actually i dont want to keep this thread alive... unless offcourse it starts to get som creative discussions on further development.... :) ... but about licenses, i can understand mikedee's reaction.

Compiz is released under MIT/GPL, actually similar to x.org... as i understand, the reason is for everyone to release plugins under allmost whichever license they like (as X.org). A GPL only license would prevent that! So plugins with GPL license is just fine for compiz!... :)

Beryl on the otherhand, can only implement GPL plugins nothing more.

The MIT/GPL license makes it allright to make a fork of compiz (beryl). And they could have used the same license and still help Compiz development... But choose GPL only which prohibits Compiz to implement improvements from beryl... but beryl still can implement improvements from compiz.... in my eyes not a friendly way.... but i guess it was not the intention!?!

MIT License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_License for those who wonder about that!

Now i think i will leave this thread alone....

[Kristian]

Actually i dont want to keep this thread alive... unless offcourse it starts to get som creative discussions on further development.... :) ... but about licenses, i can understand mikedee's reaction.

Compiz is released under MIT/GPL, actually similar to x.org... as i understand, the reason is for everyone to release plugins under allmost whichever license they like (as X.org). A GPL only license would prevent that! So plugins with GPL license is just fine for compiz!... :)

Beryl on the otherhand, can only implement GPL plugins nothing more.

I like the GPL for all it's worth. I don't like the idea of other people using my code in non-free work. That's what the GPL prevents. But let's not get caught up any more about why the specific licenses got chosen.

The MIT/GPL license makes it allright to make a fork of compiz (beryl). And they could have used the same license and still help Compiz development... But choose GPL only which prohibits Compiz to implement improvements from beryl... but beryl still can implement improvements from compiz.... in my eyes not a friendly way.... but i guess it was not the intention!?!
That's what you risk when you make such a license. With beryl beeing GPL it won't suffer from the same problem in the future if someone choose to fork Beryl.

Now i think i will leave this thread alone....
Your contribution was helpfull, it made me realise that the claim that "beryl can't help compiz" is not entierly truthfull. Beryl can help Compiz with plugins. And if I'm not much mistaken, we are allready doing that. I can understand why you don't want to discuss this further, but personally, I hope we can actually get somewhere. I also belive your post helped.

[mikedee]

If I am so mistaken as some claim about the licensing issues, please explain to me how my current plugin and future plugins can easily flow freely between compiz and beryl. As long as my plugin remains GPL, I have no problem sharing it of course. I will even help if there needs to be done some partial rewriting.

Your plugins will flow freely as long as you put the code in a publicly accessible source repository. The magic Compiz porting faries come at night and move them onto my servers, complete with gconf schema.

Likewise if any compiz plugin developers want to port their code to beryl, all they have to do is post the code and the magic beryl porting faries will do it, if you do not want the faries to take your code then mark it clearly MPL. If you want them to take it, mark it clearly GPL.

If you would like to help keep the plugins portable then reduce the use of beryl specific functions and avoid using IPCS (either use the options or send compizEvent notifications between plugins).

Generally there is no rewriting necessary, although you could have your code reviewed by David if you want. He may point out slight problems or areas where it could be improved. Corner did this with the snow plugin, he was treated very well as far as I could see, the result was a better snow plugin for everyone :)

[Kristian]

However, what would be the reason behind a MPL license ?

The choice of GPL in Beryl was not made to block code from entering compiz. It was made to ensure the future freedom of the code. Arguing that plugins can then use whatever license they will if you use MIT/GPL is a bit moot I think, since there was no plugins available at the time and I don't see how encouraging non-free stuff is a good thing. But again, that's a choice that's made and both Beryl and Compiz will have to work around it if we want to cooperate.

What's the reasoning behind an MPL license over, for instance, a dual licensed MIT/GPL license ? It seems like a way to block code from entering Beryl indeed. If I'm wrong, please tell me the reasons to use a MPL over GPL or a MIT/GPL license.

[Kristian]

(...) if you do not want the faries to take your code then mark it clearly MPL. If you want them to take it, mark it clearly GPL.

I like this. Very nice to point out right away that you do indeed intend to fight against any cooperation benefiting Beryl. Very cute.


If you would like to help keep the plugins portable then reduce the use of beryl specific functions and avoid using IPCS (either use the options or send compizEvent notifications between plugins).

I will use Beryl functions when appropriate. I do not, however, intend to overuse them just for the sake of makeing things difficult. Where they are the best solution, they will of course be used.


Generally there is no rewriting necessary, although you could have your code reviewed by David if you want. He may point out slight problems or areas where it could be improved. Corner did this with the snow plugin, he was treated very well as far as I could see, the result was a better snow plugin for everyone :)
I know the amount of rewriting necesarry. I do belive I was the first to test clone on Beryl. Also, I don't intend to rewrite my code just because David sais so. I don't respect him as much as others do as you might've picked up on. I will, however, rewrite my code if a good argument to do so is made. This goes for anyone pointing out stuff I should "correct". I don't change code until I'm absoloutly convinced it's the right option. But I doubt that will be a problem, getting the right solution is what we all want, isn't it ?

[iznogood]

I know the amount of rewriting necesarry. I do belive I was the first to test clone on Beryl. Also, I don't intend to rewrite my code just because David sais so. I don't respect him as much as others do as you might've picked up on. I will, however, rewrite my code if a good argument to do so is made. This goes for anyone pointing out stuff I should "correct". I don't change code until I'm absoloutly convinced it's the right option


This is very bad attitute for programming, as far as i can tell...
The code should always been refactored for the better, however the problem is who is to decide what code is best to use on any certain case...
Also you should never code with the mentality that you know everything(at least this is how it sounds to me). Believing in yourself is important but so is respect for others(their work). At least this is what drove me away from beryl in the first place, the way they treated someone else's work...

The problem we have is that we do not have an expert available when we need him, the problem you have is that you thing you know more than you actually do. Well i believe this goes with the younger of age for most people, learning is just part of the maturing process, what can we do....

Anyway i thing we all suffer from too much freedom, and in coding this is generally bad.Not all codes should be merged but who is to decide that?? You reject the only person YOU say is an expert...

[Kristian]

This is very bad attitute for programming, as far as i can tell...
The code should always been refactored for the better, however the problem is who is to decide what code is best to use on any certain case...
Also you should never code with the mentality that you know everything(at least this is how it sounds to me). Believing in yourself is important but so is respect for others(their work). At least this is what drove me away from beryl in the first place, the way they treated someone else's work...

Like I said: I won't change something just because one person claims it is best. He will have to give a good reason. If you knew me and how I work, you would know perfectly well that I have no problems takeing input from others regarding how I code and my solutions. However, as you obviously don't know me, I apologise if I made it sound like I think I allways know best.

I simply state that just because he's David doesn't mean he's allways right. I did not say I would ignore him.

The problem we have is that we do not have an expert available when we need him, the problem you have is that you thing you know more than you actually do. Well i believe this goes with the younger of age for most people, learning is just part of the maturing process, what can we do....

I have a firm belief that I know what I know quite well, but I have also no problems admitting my weakneses. It just so happenes that my weak points are some of David's strong points and I also belive vice versa.

By failing to see that EVERYONE has weakneses, you seem to promote this person to a god-like status and that sickens the people who have to work with the results of his weakneses.

And please don't call out the age and maturity card just yet, I could just play it right back at you which is most often what happens when people do that, and that is not very constructive.

Anyway i thing we all suffer from too much freedom, and in coding this is generally bad.Not all codes should be merged but who is to decide that?? You reject the only person YOU say is an expert...

We haven't rejected anyone I belive (unless you count mikedee). Personally I have just stated that David's work is not flawless, I have in fact stated that his code sucks. I have not rejected him. But if people can't see their own weakneses, it is very hard to work with them. Takeing advice from someone I feel write horribly ugly code wouldn't be a problem if the person and the people supporting him would admit this. Instead claims are made, mostly by other people than David him self, that he has so high standards and whatnot. The only thing I reject about David, is his coding style or lack thereof. His expertice when it comes to X and related systems has never been a question.

[iznogood]

Ok, obviously we need better communication channels between us i thing.
I will work on it ASAP if its ok with you...

[FunkyM]

Guys, have fun coding, stop wasting time with argumenting on forums ;)

[imnotpc]

I've suggested several times that we set up a section on each others forum for discussion threads on compatibility, cooperation, and rumor control. My only caveat to this is that the mods strictly enforce good forum manners or else it would turn into a never ending flame war. Kristian, if you agree can you work in the Beryl community to make this happen?

[amgeex]

I volunteer to moderate said section, if it comes to exist. :D

[iznogood]

sorry i was away for the last 3 hours...
Is there any decision made with the beryl people???

[nzjrs]

Wow

I put a small post on the compiz forum last night pointing out (again) that compiz does not depend on GNOME, and I wake up this morning and all hell has broken loose.

Firstly, Kristian and Mikedee, when you post to others forums I would like you to consider what is written here;
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LeadershipCodeofConduct

It is an Ubuntu document, but deals with how leaders should behave in public. Quite frankly I find Kristians comments here completely unprovoked and over the top - the reason I left Beryl a long time ago. And Mike, perhaps me and you should have not posted on that thread to start with.

To the forum moderators here - Read that document, be ruthless with the delete button. I do not want this forum to descend into chaos like the Beryl one.

[mikedee]

It is an Ubuntu document, but deals with how leaders should behave in public. Quite frankly I find Kristians comments here completely unprovoked and over the top - the reason I left Beryl a long time ago. And Mike, perhaps me and you should have not posted on that thread to start with.

I am very flattered that you concider me a leader, I personally consider myself to be a frontline soldier and general campaigner. I hope to move onto some coding later on :)

Perhaps I should have posted a little less, I never registered on the new look forums until people started spreading lies (or misunderstandings at least) about me. Then the Compiz vs Beryl thread appeared and I thought my initial post to that was very reserved. I have always tried to avoid pointless rambles so try to back everything up with examples and proof.

Looks like I am a mod now so ill be moving and modifying any beryl comments that are not in THIS THREAD (ie. stop flaming my plugin posts ;)). After the new year I or someone else should lock it as it gives everyone time to add their 2 pence before finally putting this matter to a rest. We will be included in Fiesty so finally the Ubuntu users will be able to compare like for like and decide for themselves.

Anyway - remember there is a logo competition going on, please go to the logo thread and lets give those guys some attention for a while. If you do not comment now - you only have yourselves to blame (probably goes for me too) :)

http://forum.go-compiz.org/viewtopic.php?t=193

[amgeex]

Alright, seems like things have cooled down here. Anyway, I do think we need forum rules or posting guidelines, or both, to avoid flamewars and the like. This thread will be locked after new year. :D

[mikedee]

The newest registered user is pissedoffdude

Or maybe not :D :roll:

[imnotpc]

I've suggested having a discussion area for common issues at least 3 times on threads that included Quinn_Storm, DBO, and now Kristian. There has been no response from the Beryl people. Ironically, despite Kristian's first few posts here (which I would have deleted if I could) I think his assessment of the differences between the projects is very similar to my own, and I think this is the closest we've been to an understanding. This thread had run it's course before Kristian's first post so I don't think there's more to say on our side. Why don't we just lock it now before it explodes again?

[amgeex]

The thread will be locked now! :twisted: