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View Full Version : Forking Unity-2d - Is it possible?



JackReacher
March 18th, 2013, 05:08 PM
I like Unity-2d in 12.04 and was disappointed to read that Canonical were not going to continue with it from 12.10 onwards due to duplication with (full blown) Unity. I believe that Unity-2d is much better and quicker than Unity especially on older machines and as a result of this would like to see development of Unity-2d continue all be it under a new name. As I have not seen the source code for Unity-2d, has it been developed under GPL?

ssam
March 18th, 2013, 05:37 PM
https://launchpad.net/unity-2d says GPLv3

tgalati4
March 18th, 2013, 06:13 PM
If supporting Unity2D becomes a burden, then MATE (a gnome2 fork) might be a consideration, since it has an active community. Linux Mint Mate runs well on older hardware.

castrojo
March 18th, 2013, 06:24 PM
I believe that Unity-2d is much better and quicker than Unity especially on older machines and as a result of this would like to see development of Unity-2d continue all be it under a new name. As I have not seen the source code for Unity-2d, has it been developed under GPL?

You might want to check out Unity Next and work on it instead: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec

(Basically Unity is going to be Qt)

Gyokuro
March 18th, 2013, 08:37 PM
As the code got released under the GPv 3 license you can fork it in case you want. The burden is that you have to maintain it yourself and Canonical will be not interested in to support this port in an official way (my opinion) as they announced UnityNext on top of Mir. However in case some people are not interested in the way how Mir/UnityNext change Ubuntus future desktop direction maybe you find enough combatants to maintain such a fork as a separate ppa to bring said people the desktop which they want. As usual Linux is about choices and nobody can force you to use anything what you do not like. If you are happy with such a fork I can only suggest you go ahead, announce it and maybe you find enough people to maintain it.

EgoGratis
March 18th, 2013, 08:43 PM
As Jorge said Unity Next will be rewritten in Qt/Qml and i think it will work out better then Unity 2D in 12.04 and until then you could simply use Ubuntu 12.04 if u like Unity 2D.