20 ms·

Reviving Old X Code

247 points by fcambus 6y ago

skissane 6y ago
Looking at bug – https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=974011 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=974011 – there is all this talk about copyright of the xmille and mille computer programs, I don't see any discussion of the question of the copyright of the underlying card game. Mille Bornes was invented by Arthur Dujardin (using pen name Edmond Dujardin), illustrated by Joseph Le Callennec, and first released in 1954 [0]. Dujardin died in 1964 [1], so using EU copyright term of author's life + 70 years, its copyright would expire in 2034. Le Callennec died in 1988, so copyright on the original illustrations would expire in 2058. (I don't know how dependent the illustrations in the computer game are on the original.) I'm not sure who currently owns the copyrights to the original card game. But Dujardin founded the Dujardin company which still sells Mille Bornes [3] so I would assume they still do. Since 2007, the Dujardin company has been owned by the French TV network TF1 [4]. The copyright owners to the card game have probably never heard of this obscure non-commercial computer game. Who knows if they'd react to it indulgently or not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Bornes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Bornes but actually the French article has a lot more information: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_bornes https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_bornes [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Dujardin https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Dujardin [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Le_Callennec https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Le_Callennec [3] https://www.jeuxdujardin.fr/produit/milles-bornes-pegboardable https://www.jeuxdujardin.fr/produit/milles-bornes-pegboardab... [4] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujardin_(%C3%A9diteur) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujardin_(%C3%A9diteur)
- twic 6y ago
  I believe that game mechanics are not copyrightable. The text and artwork are, but not the rules themselves. My dad has a naval-themed clone of Milles Borne, which we played a lot when I was a kid: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6806/nautic-miles https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6806/nautic-miles I liked it so much that when we had a school project to make a game, I made a space themed clone of that!
- tjader 6y ago
  IANAL, but I don't think games are copyrightable per se. You may have a registered tradermark on the name an logo, you have copyright over the specific artwork and text in the game, and you may have a patent in some specific mechanics of the game, but the game itself is not covered by copyright.
  - skissane 6y ago
    > IANAL, but I don't think games are copyrightable per se IANAL either, and you may well be right, but maybe this is the sort of question in which the answer may depend on which country's laws we are talking about? Even if what you say is true in country X, it might not be true in country Y. > You may have a registered tradermark on the name an logo Indeed, Dujardin SAS owns a registered US trademark on the phrase "MILLE BORNES" for a card game – https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=72156515&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=72156515&caseType=SERIAL_... – applied 1962, granted 1965, last renewed in 2015 (up for renewal again in 2025). I don't know whether a registered trademark on a physical card game applies to a computer version of it, but I would suspect it does.
    - wazoox 6y ago
      Fortunately, Xmille graphics have nothing in common with the original ones (which are really adorably old-fashioned and oh so typically '50s).
    - derefr 6y ago
      > the answer may depend on which country's laws we are talking about? Even if what you say is true in country X, it might not be true in country Y. Not really; through WIPO, the US has "rationalized" every other signatory nation's IP laws to match its own. And pretty much every country that has any IP to protect, is a member of WIPO. Some countries (e.g. China) might not bother to enforce their IP laws as strongly as the US does; but they do still have those very same IP laws, rather than materially-different ones.
      - skissane 6y ago
- bronson 6y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Mille Bornes is almost identical to Touring, a card game first produced in 1906. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touring_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touring_(card_game)
taviso 6y ago
Funny, he mentions the Xaw fonts, I was just looking at something similar. I've been using XTerm with Xft support for years but never really thought about it, how come the text in the menus and toolbars is so crunchy? I eventually tracked it down, Xaw3dXft operates in compatibility mode by default. A oneline patch enables all the new features, and makes a world of difference. Here's a screenshot, I think it's night and day: https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1344779126767435776 https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1344779126767435776 I mailed a patch to the maintainer, hopefully the next version will fix it!
- pram 6y ago
  I'm more surprised anyone is actually maintaining Xaw lol. Does Athena even use it anymore?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- fsckboy 6y ago
  it looks better, but why did they add all that whitespace? yecch
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Jkvngt 6y ago
I've been building ANCIENT Unix programs from the tuhs site, almost everything just works on modern Debian. Even the odd X11 program builds and runs fine.
MayeulC 6y ago
I'm wondering a few things regarding network transparency: - Are vector graphics drawn by the X toolkit, or is the bitmap transferred in uncompressed form to the X server for drawing? - The same regarding antialiased fonts: does the antialiasing happen at the client, or the server-side? I would tend to guess that both happen at the client side, which ends up transferring bitmaps to the server. There's hardly any advantage to X's architecture if you end up transferring bitmaps...
- sprash 6y ago
  Since he is using the Cairo library everything is rendered locally and transferred in uncompressed form to the X server for drawing. The same is true for all font engines which use in the case of Xft the Xrender extension. I never understood why they didn't include proper font rendering and Cairo into the server. This would not only solve a lot of issues like mixed dpi rendering and vastly improve network transparency but would also eradicate duplicate effort and fragmentation in the toolkit space.
  - lmz 6y ago
    What would be the fallback in your world if the server didn't support the new ops? If the fallback is client rendering, why would anyone want to risk using the (unknown) server implementation when they can just rely on the same (and tested) client code everywhere?
    - sprash 6y ago
      X11 has a strong reference implementation hence there should be no need for a fallback. If you really would want to launch a program which needs the new protocol on an old/outdated server for whatever reason you could use a wrapper like Xephyr/Xnest as fallback. (Besides, Xorg already has many optional extensions and if one of those extensions is not present the program simply fails to launch. The fallback problem has not been a real problem so far because X11 development is very centralized.)
      - 6y ago
john-tells-all 6y ago
Note: the author is Keith Packard, who wrote a ton of the original X Window System code. I adored that system! The idea of running graphical code on multiple machines, then displaying the results locally, has yet to be surpassed. "In 2011, O'Reilly awarded an open source award to Packard, as "the person behind most of the improvements made on the open source desktop in the last ten years at least."" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I attended a couple of FOSDEM talks from him, very nice experience.
- swiley 6y ago
  My understanding is that X11 documentation was how O'Reilly got started. It's fantastic that 20 years later they're still celebrating the authors and maintainers.
- pengaru 6y ago
  Keith has been super friendly and supportive in my experience. Back when I started working on a compositing window manager something like a decade ago, I used his xcompmgr as a reference and he was always responsive and helpful whenever I emailed him questions about it.
- gspr 6y ago
  His talks are also delightful. Extremely brilliant people like him often either have quirks or are not the greatest speakers (don't get me wrong – I don't expect a single human to have every skill), but Packard seems to excel at everything: he's obviously a brilliant engineer, he's a wonderful speaker, he seems to be an all-around pleasant and friendly human, he seems to manage a sane and healthy personal and family life. Just a stellar person! The single fact that he's doing RISC-V work at SiFive boosts my confidence in what they're doing.
- skohan 6y ago
  > The idea of running graphical code on multiple machines, then displaying the results locally What does this mean? It's like a remote desktop or something?
kiddico 6y ago
I'm not saying we're going to bring this guy's site down... but we're totally going to bring this guy's site down. Just going to leave this right here... https://web.archive.org/web/20210103182219/https://keithp.com/blogs/kgames/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210103182219/https://keithp.co...
- MaxLeiter 6y ago
  Good call, it’s down for me. Thanks!
garaetjjte 6y ago
>Imagine trying to build Windows or Mac OS code from the early 90's on a modern OS... I guess, in Windows case it also should be relatively easy?
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  It's really amazing that win32 has remained unchanged for so long. I guess they got it right the first time (or rather, Palo Alto Research Centre got it right the first time). And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- dbremner 6y ago
  Porting 16-bit assembly is harder but porting C code from Win16 to Win32 is pretty easy. https://github.com/dbremner/cake https://github.com/dbremner/cake is a 16-bit Windows 1.0 application that I ported to Win64; most of the changes weren't required.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Yeah, though pure X11 code should still be easier (ignoring anything not related to the APIs at hand of course, like the assumptions the existing code had about 32bit-ness) since the API hasn't changed at all. Win16 vs Win32 is 99% the same, but there are still a few minor differences, like some changes in how WPARAM (which was now 32bit) was interpreted in a few messages. Mac OS would be a complete rewrite though, no salvaging that.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Early 1990s X11 clients are sometimes broken on recent X.Org setups in my experience, in subtle ways usually involving keyboard. And that's assuming running under X.Org. As for Win32, if the application didn't do stupid things like setting bitflags that were "reserved for future use", things apparently work without recompile for basic GUI from 1.01 to Windows 10.
    - badjeans 6y ago
      Only on Windows 10 32bit, which according to steam stats, is used by 0.10% of users.
blinkingled 6y ago
TL:DR version - People who love programming are not shy or afraid of going from just needing to update copyrights to converting K&R to ANSI-C, fixing pointer bugs, adding new widgets and even finding new card images in SVG to make it look all better! Hope these KGames updates land in Debian unstable soon. Also I wondered from the headline why keithp is into XCode - might be better to have used X11 code instead.
- martyvis 6y ago
  Some of the code was from X10!
  - blinkingled 6y ago
    > A very basic port to X11 was done at some point, and that's what Debian has in the archive today So, no?
- type0 6y ago
  > Also I wondered from the headline why keithp is into XCode Yeah, dismissed it first thinking it was about appleIDE, really glad it dawned on me it's about X, good article.
babkayaga 6y ago
live xmille, great job keith! one if the new cards says vehicle prioritaire. given card names are in French should be vehicule prioritaire i guess....
- makapuf 6y ago
  Or even véhicule prioritaire.
drewg123 6y ago
A few years ago, I rebuilt my projects from my undergrad graphics class in 1991. They were written on 32-bit Decstations running ULTRIX, and worked after only a few changes on FreeBSD/amd64. Most of the changes were actually just to fix up some header file includes. I was surprised that that they worked just fine.
Lammy 6y ago
I've never seen a UI described as "rustic" before, but I love it.
- bartvk 6y ago
  He's a pretty good writer. To me, it read as a feel-good programmer story. I loved reading it.

247 points by fcambus 6y ago

Looking at bug – https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=974011 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=974011 – there is all this talk about copyright of the xmille and mille computer programs, I don't see any discussion of the question of the copyright of the underlying card game. Mille Bornes was invented by Arthur Dujardin (using pen name Edmond Dujardin), illustrated by Joseph Le Callennec, and first released in 1954 [0]. Dujardin died in 1964 [1], so using EU copyright term of author's life + 70 years, its copyright would expire in 2034. Le Callennec died in 1988, so copyright on the original illustrations would expire in 2058. (I don't know how dependent the illustrations in the computer game are on the original.) I'm not sure who currently owns the copyrights to the original card game. But Dujardin founded the Dujardin company which still sells Mille Bornes [3] so I would assume they still do. Since 2007, the Dujardin company has been owned by the French TV network TF1 [4]. The copyright owners to the card game have probably never heard of this obscure non-commercial computer game. Who knows if they'd react to it indulgently or not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Bornes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Bornes but actually the French article has a lot more information: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_bornes https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_bornes [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Dujardin https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Dujardin [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Le_Callennec https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Le_Callennec [3] https://www.jeuxdujardin.fr/produit/milles-bornes-pegboardable https://www.jeuxdujardin.fr/produit/milles-bornes-pegboardab... [4] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujardin_(%C3%A9diteur) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujardin_(%C3%A9diteur)

twic 6y ago
I believe that game mechanics are not copyrightable. The text and artwork are, but not the rules themselves. My dad has a naval-themed clone of Milles Borne, which we played a lot when I was a kid: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6806/nautic-miles https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6806/nautic-miles I liked it so much that when we had a school project to make a game, I made a space themed clone of that!
tjader 6y ago
IANAL, but I don't think games are copyrightable per se. You may have a registered tradermark on the name an logo, you have copyright over the specific artwork and text in the game, and you may have a patent in some specific mechanics of the game, but the game itself is not covered by copyright.
- skissane 6y ago
  > IANAL, but I don't think games are copyrightable per se IANAL either, and you may well be right, but maybe this is the sort of question in which the answer may depend on which country's laws we are talking about? Even if what you say is true in country X, it might not be true in country Y. > You may have a registered tradermark on the name an logo Indeed, Dujardin SAS owns a registered US trademark on the phrase "MILLE BORNES" for a card game – https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=72156515&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=72156515&caseType=SERIAL_... – applied 1962, granted 1965, last renewed in 2015 (up for renewal again in 2025). I don't know whether a registered trademark on a physical card game applies to a computer version of it, but I would suspect it does.
  - wazoox 6y ago
    Fortunately, Xmille graphics have nothing in common with the original ones (which are really adorably old-fashioned and oh so typically '50s).
  - derefr 6y ago
    > the answer may depend on which country's laws we are talking about? Even if what you say is true in country X, it might not be true in country Y. Not really; through WIPO, the US has "rationalized" every other signatory nation's IP laws to match its own. And pretty much every country that has any IP to protect, is a member of WIPO. Some countries (e.g. China) might not bother to enforce their IP laws as strongly as the US does; but they do still have those very same IP laws, rather than materially-different ones.
    - skissane 6y ago
bronson 6y ago
According to Wikipedia, Mille Bornes is almost identical to Touring, a card game first produced in 1906. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touring_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touring_(card_game)

taviso 6y ago

Funny, he mentions the Xaw fonts, I was just looking at something similar. I've been using XTerm with Xft support for years but never really thought about it, how come the text in the menus and toolbars is so crunchy? I eventually tracked it down, Xaw3dXft operates in compatibility mode by default. A oneline patch enables all the new features, and makes a world of difference. Here's a screenshot, I think it's night and day: https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1344779126767435776 https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1344779126767435776 I mailed a patch to the maintainer, hopefully the next version will fix it!

pram 6y ago
I'm more surprised anyone is actually maintaining Xaw lol. Does Athena even use it anymore?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fsckboy 6y ago
it looks better, but why did they add all that whitespace? yecch

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Jkvngt 6y ago

I've been building ANCIENT Unix programs from the tuhs site, almost everything just works on modern Debian. Even the odd X11 program builds and runs fine.

MayeulC 6y ago

I'm wondering a few things regarding network transparency: - Are vector graphics drawn by the X toolkit, or is the bitmap transferred in uncompressed form to the X server for drawing? - The same regarding antialiased fonts: does the antialiasing happen at the client, or the server-side? I would tend to guess that both happen at the client side, which ends up transferring bitmaps to the server. There's hardly any advantage to X's architecture if you end up transferring bitmaps...

sprash 6y ago
Since he is using the Cairo library everything is rendered locally and transferred in uncompressed form to the X server for drawing. The same is true for all font engines which use in the case of Xft the Xrender extension. I never understood why they didn't include proper font rendering and Cairo into the server. This would not only solve a lot of issues like mixed dpi rendering and vastly improve network transparency but would also eradicate duplicate effort and fragmentation in the toolkit space.
- lmz 6y ago
  What would be the fallback in your world if the server didn't support the new ops? If the fallback is client rendering, why would anyone want to risk using the (unknown) server implementation when they can just rely on the same (and tested) client code everywhere?
  - sprash 6y ago
    X11 has a strong reference implementation hence there should be no need for a fallback. If you really would want to launch a program which needs the new protocol on an old/outdated server for whatever reason you could use a wrapper like Xephyr/Xnest as fallback. (Besides, Xorg already has many optional extensions and if one of those extensions is not present the program simply fails to launch. The fallback problem has not been a real problem so far because X11 development is very centralized.)
    - 6y ago

john-tells-all 6y ago

Note: the author is Keith Packard, who wrote a ton of the original X Window System code. I adored that system! The idea of running graphical code on multiple machines, then displaying the results locally, has yet to be surpassed. "In 2011, O'Reilly awarded an open source award to Packard, as "the person behind most of the improvements made on the open source desktop in the last ten years at least."" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard

pjmlp 6y ago
I attended a couple of FOSDEM talks from him, very nice experience.
swiley 6y ago
My understanding is that X11 documentation was how O'Reilly got started. It's fantastic that 20 years later they're still celebrating the authors and maintainers.
pengaru 6y ago
Keith has been super friendly and supportive in my experience. Back when I started working on a compositing window manager something like a decade ago, I used his xcompmgr as a reference and he was always responsive and helpful whenever I emailed him questions about it.
gspr 6y ago
His talks are also delightful. Extremely brilliant people like him often either have quirks or are not the greatest speakers (don't get me wrong – I don't expect a single human to have every skill), but Packard seems to excel at everything: he's obviously a brilliant engineer, he's a wonderful speaker, he seems to be an all-around pleasant and friendly human, he seems to manage a sane and healthy personal and family life. Just a stellar person! The single fact that he's doing RISC-V work at SiFive boosts my confidence in what they're doing.
skohan 6y ago
> The idea of running graphical code on multiple machines, then displaying the results locally What does this mean? It's like a remote desktop or something?

kiddico 6y ago

I'm not saying we're going to bring this guy's site down... but we're totally going to bring this guy's site down. Just going to leave this right here... https://web.archive.org/web/20210103182219/https://keithp.com/blogs/kgames/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210103182219/https://keithp.co...

MaxLeiter 6y ago
Good call, it’s down for me. Thanks!

garaetjjte 6y ago

>Imagine trying to build Windows or Mac OS code from the early 90's on a modern OS... I guess, in Windows case it also should be relatively easy?

phendrenad2 6y ago
It's really amazing that win32 has remained unchanged for so long. I guess they got it right the first time (or rather, Palo Alto Research Centre got it right the first time). And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
dbremner 6y ago
Porting 16-bit assembly is harder but porting C code from Win16 to Win32 is pretty easy. https://github.com/dbremner/cake https://github.com/dbremner/cake is a 16-bit Windows 1.0 application that I ported to Win64; most of the changes weren't required.
badsectoracula 6y ago
Yeah, though pure X11 code should still be easier (ignoring anything not related to the APIs at hand of course, like the assumptions the existing code had about 32bit-ness) since the API hasn't changed at all. Win16 vs Win32 is 99% the same, but there are still a few minor differences, like some changes in how WPARAM (which was now 32bit) was interpreted in a few messages. Mac OS would be a complete rewrite though, no salvaging that.
- p_l 6y ago
  Early 1990s X11 clients are sometimes broken on recent X.Org setups in my experience, in subtle ways usually involving keyboard. And that's assuming running under X.Org. As for Win32, if the application didn't do stupid things like setting bitflags that were "reserved for future use", things apparently work without recompile for basic GUI from 1.01 to Windows 10.
  - badjeans 6y ago
    Only on Windows 10 32bit, which according to steam stats, is used by 0.10% of users.

blinkingled 6y ago

TL:DR version - People who love programming are not shy or afraid of going from just needing to update copyrights to converting K&R to ANSI-C, fixing pointer bugs, adding new widgets and even finding new card images in SVG to make it look all better! Hope these KGames updates land in Debian unstable soon. Also I wondered from the headline why keithp is into XCode - might be better to have used X11 code instead.

martyvis 6y ago
Some of the code was from X10!
- blinkingled 6y ago
  > A very basic port to X11 was done at some point, and that's what Debian has in the archive today So, no?
type0 6y ago
> Also I wondered from the headline why keithp is into XCode Yeah, dismissed it first thinking it was about appleIDE, really glad it dawned on me it's about X, good article.

babkayaga 6y ago

live xmille, great job keith! one if the new cards says vehicle prioritaire. given card names are in French should be vehicule prioritaire i guess....

makapuf 6y ago
Or even véhicule prioritaire.

drewg123 6y ago

A few years ago, I rebuilt my projects from my undergrad graphics class in 1991. They were written on 32-bit Decstations running ULTRIX, and worked after only a few changes on FreeBSD/amd64. Most of the changes were actually just to fix up some header file includes. I was surprised that that they worked just fine.

Lammy 6y ago

I've never seen a UI described as "rustic" before, but I love it.

bartvk 6y ago
He's a pretty good writer. To me, it read as a feel-good programmer story. I loved reading it.