The “Break it Down” Blog

Beryl 0.2.0 Released

Beryl is the ego-branch of Compiz by QuinnStorm and a few others when they decided they half-baked hacks for Compiz weren’t being rolled back into Compiz fast enough by the original Compiz team. In true hacker fashion the folks decided to branch the project, creating confusion and incompatability rather then putting their egos aside and working with the Compiz team.

What drives me crazy about this approach is that it gets us farther away from the ultimate goal: Fantastic desktops on Linux, rather than closer. Fortunately, I’m seeing Novell (creators of Compiz) and RedHat using the Compiz project instead of the branched Beryl project. I pray to god that Ubuntu chooses Compiz for it’s next release as the default desktop.

Oddly enough, as frustrated as I am with the division of work, I almost think Beryl is good for Compiz. It’s the crazy half-cousin that tries everything (all the new effects, good and bad) and slowly the best-of-breed ideas can trickle from Beryl back into the stable Compiz code base.

So to clarify… it’s not that I hate the Beryl project, it’s that I hate what it represents. Hotshot cowboy programmers that want the fame more than they want to solve the problem. If anyone argues against that, I’d ask them to consider if the project had to be branched completely anonymously and none of the devs on Beryl were ever able to disclose their names, would they have stilled branched it? I doubt it.

Update #1: Nice… interesting post on OS News clarify some of the Beryl moves (original comment from wibbit):

1. Beryl has chosen a licence that pretty much prevents Compiz from benefiting from Beryls development, however allows Beryl to continue obtaining code from Compiz.
2. Beryl developers “regularly” take code from Compiz, and include it in Beryl with out any actual acknowledge ment to the compiz folk that this is being done.

So an ego-charged, incompatible fork of Compiz pro-actively decides to separate itself from Compiz even to the point of the license but can stlil absorb changes? Classy, and par-for-the-course given the reason the project was started.