[mjn]

> The last stable release of Cairo was in October 2018

Looking at the release history, as far as I can tell, every release since 2013 was rolled by Bryce Harrington, who at the time was employed with Samsung Open Source Group. Samsung shut the group down in... October 2018 [1].

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-...

[perlgeek]

A related question I've asked myself a few times already, with no good answer yet: is it good for the long-term health of an OSS project if it has sponsored developer(s) from a single company?

If Cairo didn't have that support, it might have fizzled out much earlier. Or a more heterogeneous community might have emerged, which would be more resilient to a single sponsor dropping out.

If anybody has data (not just anecdotes) regarding this question, I would be very grateful!

[carschno]

> is it good for the long-term health of an OSS project if it has sponsored developer(s) from a single company?

Surely, the answer is "no" in absolute terms. In relative terms, however, the answer is "better than none" most of the time.

[kevincox]

Having anything you care about being in a single failure domain is a bad idea.

- A single company is a bad idea. - A single maintainer is a bad idea. - Maintainers from a single country is a bad idea.

So yes, having all of your maintainers in one company is bad for long-term health.

But 1 is better than 0!

[NewJazz]

They still employed Enlightenment / EFL developers until a few months ago.

[bokchoi]

Ah, I'd forgotten about Enlightenment. Did Samsung give up on it? I am reminded of this wonderful post on thedailywtf:

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

[chriswarbo]

Wow, not seen that rant before! I remember the OpenMoko devs went all-in on GTK (there was a lot of hype at GUADEC, around the same time as Moblin too), but the OS they shipped was very basic, and the actual phone functionality (calls, texts, contacts, etc.) was taken from QtMobile (later renamed Qtopia, then QtExtended). Later, OpenMoko decided to ditch GTK in favour of Enlightenment, which was certainly prettier, but again the actual phone functionality was QtMobile.

According to Wikipedia Moblin became MeeGo, and MeeGo got replaced by Tizen. So it looks like the same GTK-to-Enlightenment switch was made at least twice (possibly FOMO?).

I've only played with programming Enlightement a little; so never had to encounter the horrors described in that link. As a user I really like E16 (it's my go-to non-tiling WM; but I prefer tiling these days). I never got into E17 on the desktop (it's usable on OpenMoko, but I tend to use QtExtended). I like the fact they're pushing what can be done with 2D raster graphics, since everyone else seems to be vector-based (e.g. Cairo) or 3D (e.g. Compiz); but I never found E17 appealing as a WM or desktop from a productivity perspective.

[roel_v]

Lol I never saw that before, thanks. In the late 1990's, Englightenment was the WM that was used as the prime example of why Linux was so cool. Its terminal emulator had transparent backgrounds! (I suspect the separate 'background' element you need, mentioned in the link, has something to do with that?) Of course most of us didn't have the hardware required to run Englightenment and its advanced (for the time) graphics capabilities, but that never stopped anyone from using its screenshots as propaganda. Ah, how naive we were. Well certainly I was.

[kar1181]

Enlightenment is what got my to try linux (Redhat hurricane I think it was) way back when.

It was very pretty and _very_ broken then, but e-term, which required a tonne of E libs, was the terminal everyone used to show off their desktop so you kind of lived with it.

[bokchoi]

I never did manage to get it running. I spent a long time trying to compile it on yellow dog linux. I gave up and used fvwm2 instead. Ah, the halcyon days of college when I had more time to waste trying to get things running.

[ncmncm]

Money quote: "And did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?"

[rjzzleep]

I kinda like Tizen, but Samsung is really shockingly bad at open source. They assimilate and then try appropriate without building a community around it. Joyent public is kinda dead. There is a fork of SmartOS (Danube Cloud), which has far better documentation is much easier to run and actually runs in cheap DC environments like OVH and Hetzner and they have 2.5 active developers.

Tizen is much better in terms of battery than Android Wearable and most other wearables, has pretty decent features, but is a complete mess to get applications on and there is hardly any third party using Tizen, let alone write documentation/tutorials on its development.

All I know about Tizen is from reverse engineering my shitty Galaxy Active 2 with all the on launch promised features disabled if you don't use a Samsung phone and most of them released over a year after the original announcement.

Most people on xda-developers say that it will be their last Samsung wearable. And if you look at the numbers Samsung wearables has crashed in sales.

[baybal2]

> I kinda like Tizen, but Samsung is really shockingly bad at open source.

I'd say the biggest advantage of opensource is that it allows "shockingly bad" code to gradually turn good, rather than being thrown into the garbage bin right away 99% of the time despite of potential for improvement.

But you negate that if you don't actually get less bad people into the project, which is the case with most projects that say "send patches, and we may not throw it away after you concede all rights to your code"

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That was a great read!

Thanks for sharing it.

[tankenmate]

Bryce Harrington is the founder / board member of inkscape if memory serves. As far as the Samsung Open Source Group is concerned Carsten Haitzler was heavily involved with that. Carsten is also the founder of Enlightenment. I'd be surprised if there is no one on HN who couldn't get a hold of one or either of them.

[e12e]

Looks like Harrington is willing and able to help - and train a replacement - so not all hope is lost?

https://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2020-November...