Wayland of course is the present and the future, Xorg receiving only the bare minimum of attention.<p>But I believe that many technologies, protocols, and formats that were commonplace in late 90s/early 2000s are just here to stay forever: X11, BIOS/MBR, FAT32, 32-bit x86 PE, Win32, GTK2, Cocoa... The Linux kernel still runs static binaries built in mid-90s.<p>Judging from the feature list, TinyX hits a very sweet spot for otherwise underpowered or obsolete machines. You can of course spend €50 and get a RasPi that can handle a more complex / demanding stack, but also you can take advantage of the spare power, or just appreciate the architectural simplicity.
Thread at the time <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36498484">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36498484</a>
On the topic of the license, I find most small projects that use GPL suffer from delusions of grandeur.<p>First to address the readme. Their goal for switch to GPL for closed devices is kind of pointless. For a closed device, they can still use it without modification. And even if they do modify it, how would you know. How would you prove it's your codebase they modified? The GPL does little to protect small projects. If they made money and got caught, they can just pay their way out of it. If they didn't make any money, well, no one would have probably found out until they they were a defunct company or the product was cancelled.<p>Second, more on the delusions of grandeur. Let's be real, this project is a small project with very little chance to grow big. It might become the defacto X server for old tech, but I doubt it would be used for anything new. And even if it is, not for many. The GPL won't protect it because it's obscure.<p>The GPL works for big high profile projects, like the Linux Kernel. It worked in the past because companies hadn't figured out a way around it, or that they can just ignore it and deal with the consequences later. They usually get away with it too, with little cost to them, as they have made their money.<p>I personally avoid releasing any of my projects as GPL. Because the likelihood of any of my projects being huge is minimal, and if they go big, I can change the license then. Maybe a non open source license like the Fair Source License that then transitions to MIT or Apache after 1-2 years.
Stallman's principles should be directional - an orientation, aspirational, not something to cling to with bitter insistence. It's the equivalent of screaming "why can't we all just get along" into the Matrix.<p>Copyleft isn't how the world works. MIT and Apache and liberal licenses liberate ideas for reuse and practical application in the real world. If you want your project to be a quirky curiosity visited and abandoned by people searching for some better solution for their problem, use copyleft.<p>If you want your idea to make the world a better place, use permissive, liberal licensing and move on.<p>Forking something from MIT to GPLv3 is disappointing, from this standpoint.