X.Org Foundation Releases X11R6.7 X Window System 443
Several folks submitted the press release announcing the formation of the X.Org Foundation and the release of X11R6.7 of the X Window System. The XOrg Foundation is the successor to the X Consortium, formed by many of the most notworthy participants in the XFree86 Project. This code release is a tree forked from the last XFree86 release not troubled by that pesky license change. Since Mandrake, Gentoo, OpenBSD, and Debian have already rejected the new XFree86 license, this new code tree will likely become the default X11 for most Linux users. I've attached the press release that explains more details about the code release, as well as the X.Org foundation itself.
XOrg Foundation writes "X.Org Foundation Announces Formation and First ReleaseThe new X.Org Foundation will help drive the X Window System to support
state-of-the-art desktop technologies
San Francisco, CA., April 6, 2004 - X.Org Foundation today announces their first release of the X Window System since the formation of the Foundation in January of this year. The new X.Org release, called X Window System Version 11 Release 6.7 (X11R6.7), builds on the work of the X.Org X11R6.6 and XFree86TM Project Inc. V4.4RC2 releases to combine many of the latest developments from a large number of the participants and companies working with the X Window community. The X Window System X11R6.7 release can be found at http://www.x.org/.
We have made great progress in creating a framework upon which further development of the X Window System can be based, agreed the Interim Board of the Foundation. We expect to provide the desktop community with at least two more releases of the X Window System before the end of this year to encompass all of the new technologies and ideas that we are developing.
This release marks the return to community development of the X Window System under governance open to all contributors for the first time since the founding of the X Consortium in 1988, said Jim Gettys, co-founder of the X Window System, Interim X.Org Foundation board member and member of the research staff of HP Labs.
We welcome the formation of the X.Org Foundation and are looking forward to support this group to bring the work on the X Window System to a new technological level, said Egbert Eich, X Window System developer at Novell's SUSE LINUX business unit.
Matthias Ettrich, Director of Software Development at Trolltech, said As a multi-platform GUI toolkit vendor, we appreciate the value of a powerful underlying windowing system, and as such, we are excited about the direction X.Org is heading. We are very much looking forward to supporting new technologies around X, and we will do our share to make the advances of the platform accessible to software developers.
Being an underlying technology to the most popular desktops on all GNU Systems, in particular GNOME and KDE, the X Window System is indeed an essential part of most Free Software operating systems, said Georg C.F. Greve, president of the FSF Europe. It helps many users to access and enjoy the freedom of Free Software. We are glad that X.Org will from now on watch over this enabling technology.
Red Hat is pleased to be working with the new X.Org Foundation to build a vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation. Look for X11R6.7 in the upcoming Fedora Core 2 and future Red Hat Enterprise Linux products, said Havoc Pennington, desktop development manager at Red Hat.
As one of the largest GNU/Linux distribution projects in the world, the Debian Project is delighted to see that freedom and diversity are alive and well in the X technology sector. We're also delighted that the X.Org Foundation is dedicated to retaining the licensing model that has made the X Window System an enduring success, said Branden Robinson of the Debian GNU/Linux Project. Like us, the X.Org Foundation is a member-driven organization devoted to Free Software. We cannot help but be enthusiastic about them and the work they're doing for the X Window System and Free Software communities alike.
An open source project works best with a large community of active contributors. OSI welcomes the return of X to open source development by the entire community. I'm looking forward to contributing myself, said Russell Nelson, Vice-President of the Open Source Initiative.
Cygwin/X is benefiting heavily from the community-building spirit of the X.Org Foundation and their open development environment. We are pleased to be basing our releases on the good work of the X.Org Foundation, said Harold L Hunt II of the Cygwin/X project.
The XonX Project is very pleased that the X.Org Foundation has been eager to support Darwin and Mac OS X. X11R6.7 adds new features that will be appreciated by many Mac OS X users, said Torrey Lyons, XonX Project Founder.
Membership of the X.Org Foundation is free to all participants. Applications for membership are now being accepted, and active participants in the further development of the X Window System are invited to visit: http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html to complete a membership application. Participation in the Foundations Sponsor Group is also available to those who wish to financially support the activities The X.Org Foundation. Current Sponsors include Hewlett Packard, IBM, and SUN Microsystems.
About The Foundation Release
X11R6.7 is the first official X.Org Foundation release. It is the successor release to X11R6.6 from X.Org. To assure consistency with industry and community requirements and practices, it was developed from the X.Org X11R6.6 code base and the XFree86 V4.4RC2 code base, with the addition of bug fixes and enhancements. These enhancements include: new IPv6 functionality, Freetype V2.1.7, fontconfig V2.2.2, Xft V2.1.6, Xcursor V1.1.2, and Xrender V0.8.4, with corresponding changes in documentation and notices. Additional source and binary releases are anticipated during 2004.
About The X Window System
The X Window System provides the only common networked windowing environment bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's computing. The X Window System is one of the most successful open-source, collaborative technologies developed to date and is the standard graphical window system for the Linux and UNIX operating systems. The inherent independence of the X Window System from the operating system, the network and the hardware, as well as its successful interoperability, have made it widely available and deployed with more than 30 million users worldwide. All major hardware vendors support the X Window System and many third parties provide technologies for integrating X Window System applications into the networked computer or personal computer environments including Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X. Further, thousands of software developers provide X Window System applications, and with the continued growth of Linux and the emergence of Mac OS X, the number of users is growing rapidly.
About X.Org Foundation
X.Org Foundation L.L.C. is a recently formed Delaware company organized to operate as a scientific charity under IRS code 501(c)(3), chartered to develop and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship of the X Window System technology and standards. The group is currently managed by an Interim Board of Directors that includes: Stuart Anderson (Free Standards Group), Egbert Eich (SUSE), Jim Gettys (HP), Georg Greve (Free Software Foundation Europe), Stuart Kreitman (SUN Microsystems), Kevin Martin (Red Hat), Jim McQuillan (Linux Terminal Server Project), Leon Shiman (Shiman Associates) and Jeremy White (Code Weavers). The website for the X.Org Foundation can be found at http://www.x.org/.
Note to editors: UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries. LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. XFree86 is a trademark of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other company names are trademarks of the registered owners.
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And some people have a bad feeling.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Licenses. (Score:2, Interesting)
Damn... (Score:4, Interesting)
So what's left for XFree86? (Score:5, Interesting)
alphablending etc. (Score:4, Interesting)
NVidia (Score:5, Interesting)
Judging form the fact that's forked of XF4.4rc2 it should , but I'd like to get confirmation .
XFree86 (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, some of us care more about the fact that it is still free (as in beer and in speech) than the exact wording of the license.
Re:Ugh (Score:2, Interesting)
> The name of the X server is Xorg, rather than XFree86.
Re:Y11 Release 6.7 (Score:3, Interesting)
That ridiculous. The project implements an X server that understands the X protocol, just like XFree86, FDO's XServer, XiG's X server, Apple's X server and others. Why would they name themselves Y (no pun intended)?
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Licenses. (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that the XFree86 libraries, you know those things that actually links to GNOME and KDE, aren't under a new license.
Dinivin
David Dawes? (Score:5, Interesting)
From reading the coverage on slashdot so far and following the source material (including specific comments by major players that name his name), that's kind of the sense I get.
Of course, the process created more openness - you can say the openness is the primary reason, but again, from following the list archives, I got the sense he was a big part of why it wasn't so open in the first place...
Con job? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Con job? (Score:4, Interesting)
"But David Dawes seems a little suspicious: "I have heard privately that some vendors were planning to move to an X.Org release even before this licence issue came up. That probably makes business sense for the vendors given that X.Org is a vendor-oriented organization sponsored by hardware and software companies, while XFree86 is an independent group of volunteer developers. I suspect that the licence issue may have affected the timing, but not the end result", he concluded. "
The question is (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:David Dawes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Politics! (Score:4, Interesting)
Comments on suggested representatives:
RedHat - Good choice.
KDE - Why? They only deal with QT, not X. Trolltech might be a good choice.
Gnome - Why? They only deal with GTK, not X. Maybe you mean the GTK devs.
Present X devs - The core XF86 team is the reason this mess started in the first place. They shouldn't be brought in to f--- any new standard up.
Apple - Why? Apple uses Quartz, they could care less about X and might even have an incentive to see it fail.
IBM - Good choice.
Sun - Good choice -but- I am starting to have trouble trusting Sun, it's still a stretch but I'm seeing the beginnings of the next SCO in them.
Microsoft - Never. They only have a vested interest in seeing X fail. Look at all the good work they did with OpenGL as an example.
Design by committee sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it interesting that you insist (in boldface) that Apple be such an important player in that kind of process. Apple would have shipped OS X earlier if it had tempered the advice of all the experts they'd brought in with some common sense. (The obvious example is Tevanian's insistence on using Mach, which required a good part of a whole team of kernel engineers over 4 years to fix up, because it was his pet research project at CMU.)
Re:Politics! (Score:4, Interesting)
You say the forks haven't been around long enough to prove their stability? How about Debian's for of XFree86? They port it to many architectures and then maintain a stable release for a few years while working on its replacement. I think they are proven.
This fork (X.org) is simply XFree86 4.4RC2 (before the liscense change) and I would suspect they are monitoring XFree86 for updates which aren't tainted by the new license, and they are working on it themselves. It's not a worrying fork at this stage, it's just what would have happened if XFree86 (or another FOSS project) and all it's internal developers were blown up yesterday. These people have all been working with XFree86 from the outside for quite a while and it includes Cygwin's Mr Hunt who had withdrawn cygwin from XFree86 (well stopped sending patches) because it was more work to liase with XFree86 than not to! I see good things ahead (but first we have a nice stable XFree86 4.4 replacement so there are no hiccups).
Re:Con job? (Score:3, Interesting)
Debian hasn't moved to X.org so far as I'm aware. They've just decided to avoid XFree 4.4.
Re:Step forward (Score:4, Interesting)
We have been using TCP/IP for something like 20-30 years now. OMG, TCP/IP-developement is stagnant! We must work faster!
Of what? X? To my knowledge: zero. X is a protocol, nothing more. If you are talking about Xfree, the answer would be: two. Xouvert and Xorg.
Re:I didn't see it in the changelog... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's one of those stupid things that's a pain in the ass for newbies who wonder why they can't scroll mozilla. And a non-functioning wheel out of the box leaves a *really* negative impression on people I've helped switch to Linux. I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.
I shit you not, when I've told people I think Linux is better, one of my friends in particular always chimes in, "Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"...
That said, I still think linux is easier in general
already more up to date than xfree86 (Score:2, Interesting)
Y Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
The PDF there describes all the reasons they're replacing X, and they make sense. They're planning to get a 1.0 release out the door within a year. It's going to be vector-based, hardware-accelerated and so on.
I think it will eventually be the superior technology to X, which is so riddle with extensions that they're conflicting each other now.
Re:The question is (Score:0, Interesting)
And what is this alternative? A rebranded XFree86 4.3.0.1 with the various updates that could be easily found online? You know, when XFree86 began working on the X codebase it wouldn't even run on an x86 PC - they've done some remarkable work. X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit, applied some debatable updates to the code (using an unstable freetype2 is probably not wise), and now they've put it back up for download.
Yessir, hand 'em the crown...
Re:David Dawes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Spin job! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the big Linux vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, and the license change was just the steel girder that broke the camel's back. XFree86, as an organization, has had increasing bad publicity: patches languishing, weird political in-fighting, organizational chaos. The license change got a whole bunch of people, all at once, to stop muttering in annoyance and actually fork the project. (Maybe we should thank XFree86 for making it happen so quickly.)
Another priceless bit of spin: now XFree86 can now get back to its roots, distributing software directly to end users. That sounds much better than "all the Linux distros are dumping us like last month's garbage".
XFree86, both the organization and the software, will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know whether they will actually disappear, but it's safe to stop paying attention to them.
steveha
It's about time... (Score:3, Interesting)
We've had some innovation, but it was definitely slowing down. But vibrant community? More of a dysfunctional family. (Not that everyone was dysfunctional, by a long shot, but the leadership mix clearly wasn't working.) Having the sole focus be the PC community always worried me, too. (Yeah, I know it's the largets by orders of magnitude, but the cross-platform expertise and disciplines have a lot to offer.)
In the early days, anyone who wanted to contribute did, and it all worked rather well. X was one of the first *major* open source projects to really take off. I, for one, am glad to see it back in a form that has a chance to really start kicking some proprietary booty again.
XFree86 to lose multi-platform? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now Debian is simply going to walk away from XFree86. The XFree86 project will either have to suddenly do a whole bunch of work to keep the multi-platform nature of XFree86, or else the "86" part is going to mean something again.
I find it amazing that the XFree86 guys ever thought that this license change was a good idea, and that they aren't falling all over themselves to reverse it now that the consequences are becoming clear.
steveha
Re:The question is (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't care about upgrade paths, I suppose there is no problem, since the problem with using XFree86 4.4.0 right now is that the upgrade path is legally uncertain. David Dawes has been non-committal about whether the XFree client libs will be under the new GPL-incompatible license in the future. Given that the XFree client libs are under the old license at all is a grudging concession on his part, there is at least a medium-size risk that he will outright make the whole of XFree86 GPL-incompatible, so that a Linux distributor can no longer distribute GPL'd apps linked to the client libs of a future version of XFree86, say, version 4.4.2.