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Several months after parting ways, the leaders of the two leading 3D compositing Linux desktop projects, Compiz and Beryl, have agreed to come back together.
Quinn Storm, one of Beryls creators, wrote last September that “it at least feels as though development is rather closed, with any possibility of getting code into the main source tree being at best a procedural headache.”
The specific problem, according to the Open Software Wiki, that led to “the fork was communication problems between the Compiz insider developer community at Novell and the community of users on the Compiz mailing list. Patches submitted to Compiz were not felt to be applied in a desired way, so in the summer of 2006, work began on a development fork for community contributions.”
Frustrated by this inability to have their say in the Compiz project, Storm and others launched the Beryl fork to Compiz on Sept. 18.
In response, David Reveman, a Novell developer and the Compiz maintainer, wrote on the Freedesktop Compiz list, “I take seriously the feedback from the community that they would like to see more open communication from me about the Compiz road map and what Im working on. Ill do my best to improve this in the future, and Im always open to discussion about where Compiz should go!”
As time went on, the Beryl leadership began to question just how wise their move had been.