xv is deprecated?!?

Posted Jan 5, 2012 2:22 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599)
In reply to: xv is deprecated?!? by ThomasAdam
Parent article: FVWM 2.6: A new release for a venerable window manager

I certainly wouldn't consider "xv" deprecated, either.

While it's as useful as it ever was--in part due to the relative lack of bloat, which means it has been able to take advantage of hardware advances and not appear to be "just keeping up"--there are two big reasons why it's generally considered deprecated: (1) it's source-available shareware, not true open-source software (much less Free/Libre software), and (2) its original/primary author abandoned it long ago and, so far, has proven unwilling or uninterested to ease the license restrictions so that it might grow into a real open-source application.

I (and others) have created increasingly unwieldy patchsets for it--search freshmeat/freecode for "XV Jumbo Patches" for mine--but it's pretty hard to stay interested when the license reserves pretty much everything to the original author, including even the right to distributed patched sources.

[And apologies to all for the ridiculously delayed response. New job. ;-) ]

Greg