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X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

[Posted April 7, 2004 by corbet]

From:  Leon Shiman <leon-AT-magic.shiman.com>
To:  pr-AT-lwn.net
Subject:  XOrg Foundation Releases X Window System X11R6.7
Date:  Wed, 7 Apr 2004 01:41:35 -0400 (EDT)

X.Org Foundation Announces Formation and First Release

The 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 Foundation’s 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.

to post comments

X11R6.7 Release Notes

Posted Apr 7, 2004 13:17 UTC (Wed) by heinlein (guest, #1029) [Link] (9 responses)

Further info about the new 6.7 release can be found in the Release Notes at freedesktop.org.

X11R6.7 Release Notes

Posted Apr 7, 2004 15:18 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (5 responses)

Surprisingly, it seems to throw away a lot of stuff. PEX, CIE, tinyX, ...
Spring cleaning in X11 land?

License issues

Posted Apr 7, 2004 17:03 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe the stuff that was dropped didn't have an acceptable license? I
know the new license that everyone hated started appearing in September.

License issues

Posted Apr 7, 2004 17:41 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

A lot of the stuff that's mentioned as being dropped was also dropped in the XFree86 4.4 release (like PEX, etc.), mostly because it was obsolete. Only a few files in the XFree86 codebase had the widely disliked new license.

On the other hand, there's other updates in this new x.org release that (I believe) are not in XF86 4.4 (the freetype, xft, etc. updates for example). I could be wrong about that though, as it's from memory (of compiling the XF86 4.3.99.90[23] releases) several weeks ago.

CIE

Posted Apr 7, 2004 18:47 UTC (Wed) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you mean color management has been removed? I agree that it was mis-
designed but I know quite a few applications use it if only to allow users
to specify colors in different colorspaces.

XIE, not CIE

Posted Apr 8, 2004 6:23 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Do you mean color management has been removed?

Sorry, I mistyped, the rekevant part of the release notes was:

* The remains of XIE and PEX extensions were removed completely. Similarly, libxml2's remains were removed, as it is not used at all in the distribution.

XIE appears to be (or have been) "X Image Extension", for server-side handling of images. One reference I found is Developing Imaging Applications with XIElib. Sound useful, I wonder why it got deprecated?

I guess if every X11 served did not have XIE, any image manipulation program would have to have a replacement code in itself anyway to be portable, and so software authors naturally had little motivation to rely on it in any way. But the same reasoning works against any other X11 extension, and yet some of them get used.

X11R6.7 Release Notes

Posted Apr 7, 2004 22:17 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

PEX, for one, was long dead (I think XFree86-4.2.x ditched it). This just ditches some remnants.

X11R6.7 Release Notes - note the dropping of the 1.1 license.

Posted Apr 7, 2004 21:55 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (2 responses)

Note that one of the key enhancements is that "only files without the new XFree86 1.1 license are included in the X11R6.7.0 release." We are finally seeing the results of David Dawes' extremely controversial switch to a GPL-incompatible license. Distributors are now abandoning XFree86, and it looks like X.org will be (at least in the short term) the new home of X. I've updated my essay on GPL compatibility with a discussion on this. My essay has said for years that GPL compatibility is important for open source software / Free Software; this is an extraordinarily clear example of that.

X11R6.7 Release Notes - note the dropping of the 1.1 license.

Posted Apr 8, 2004 1:41 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, isn't that funny. He wanted more recognition and now he's going to get less recognition. Looks like XFree86 is going nowhere fast. It is sad that developers with heaps of experience are lost over such trivial matters.

Recognition and David Dawes

Posted Apr 9, 2004 10:02 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

.. Of David Dawes..
> He wanted more recognition and now he's
> going to get less recognition.

I don't know.. I do know that the name "David Dawes" has more name
recognition HERE now than it used to.. Of course, it's /infamous/,
not /famous/, recognition, much like, say, Daryl McBride, right now, only
not /quite/ to the same extent. <g>

Duncan

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 13:39 UTC (Wed) by pivot (guest, #588) [Link] (2 responses)

Too bad the previous license hurdles and forks have left some important people with a bad feeling of it all..

http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg05907.html

X11R6.4 license change

Posted Apr 7, 2004 21:50 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

Another example from the past: http://cbbrowne.com/info/x11r6.4.html

x.org changed the license on X11R6.4 to proprietary but had to restore the original license. XFree86 was staying with X11R6.3 in the meantime. Now XFree86 changed the license and x.org is working on the fork. The history repeats itself.

X11R6.4 license change

Posted Jan 6, 2021 18:00 UTC (Wed) by zdavatz (guest, #70954) [Link]

Lets hope the same will happen with Qt5/6, see https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commer...

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 14:19 UTC (Wed) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link] (9 responses)

That's great news, but I can't help wondering why the press release is full of question marks where there should be quotation marks. Are they doing their X development on MS Windoze? :)

Weird characters

Posted Apr 7, 2004 14:24 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (7 responses)

Interesting. I had noticed the funky characters when feeding the PR into the system, but firefox renders them as quotes so I left them as they were. Maybe I should fix them up...

Weird characters

Posted Apr 7, 2004 15:17 UTC (Wed) by scglwn (guest, #1245) [Link] (3 responses)

The html source doesn't literally contain those characters, but instead it contains the so-called decimal entity references: &#8220; and &#8221;. I believe that that's the correct way of doing such things. (e.g. the euro symbol would be &#8364;)

Weird characters

Posted Apr 7, 2004 15:34 UTC (Wed) by pkturner (subscriber, #2809) [Link] (1 responses)

When my Mozilla browser downloads the HTML, it has the byte codes 0x93 and 0x94 in those locations. Those are Windows codes, not part of the iso-8859-1 charset.

Weird characters

Posted Apr 8, 2004 7:56 UTC (Thu) by scglwn (guest, #1245) [Link]

You are right, sorry for the confusion. After saving the page to a file, Firefox silently replaces the (invalid) character codes by the correct decimal references. Yeeks!

Weird characters - decimals are correct.

Posted Apr 7, 2004 21:44 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

Yes, the safest way to insert curling quotation marks is the decimal codes. See my paper on quotes in HTML, XML, and SGML for more information.

Weird characters

Posted Apr 7, 2004 18:43 UTC (Wed) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (2 responses)

They are in Microsoft's own proprietary character set which is almost, but
not quite, the same as ISO Latin-1. Most Microsoft products silently
insert these proprietary quotes if you have the smart quotes option turned
on. It's much better to use HTML entities with Unicode numbers for curly
quotes or to just use plain ASCII quotes. There's an old script call the
Demoronizer which fixes up problems like these.

What's interesting is that the newer Mozilla releases have capitulated.
They now interpret those quotes "correctly" even if the page's character
set marks those characters as reserved. Kind of sad actually.

&ldquo; &rdquo; &lsquo; &rsquo; work on everything I have here

Posted Apr 9, 2004 4:21 UTC (Fri) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] (1 responses)

That's what OpenOffice's HTML editor uses, so I've taken to using them in my own HTML, and not found anything that blips yet. Konqeror seems to know enough to replace them with straight quotes if the charset doesn't support them. What does your browser show?

"straight quotes"

“double curlies”

'apostrophes'

‘single curlies’

&ldquo; &rdquo; &lsquo; &rsquo; work on everything I have here

Posted Apr 9, 2004 16:32 UTC (Fri) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

Yes, all those show up correctly. However the original document didn't use
them -- it used raw 8-bit characters in the reserved range. But as for what
HTML entities to use, &#8220; is even more portable than &ldquo;.

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 14:44 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]

I don't see question marks... what browser are you using?

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 14:31 UTC (Wed) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] (4 responses)

So what is the history of all this, where does Keith Packards early split fit with xouvert fit with X.org etc?

Anyway I found this funny:

"Also, please do let me know if something is horribly wrong; I haven't done
an X release in about 12 years." (from the posting by the finally? vindicated Keith Packard)

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 16:06 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

No-one currently associated with X.Org (that includes Keith) was associated
with Xouvert. Xouvert was led by Jonathan Walther, and its main developer was
William Lathi; it was a project that mainly lays idle after managing to convert
revision control systems. I believe it was due for release 2 a week ago now, but
the mailing lists have been silent for months.

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 18:20 UTC (Wed) by raytd (guest, #4823) [Link] (2 responses)

> So what is the history of all this...

Good question. Since the "rift" occured, I've perused the ml archives of fdo and xfree on occasion looking for answers to no avail. What really happened (as well as where things are headed now) is not at all obvious to me.

<hint>
I was kind of hoping the kind Mr. Corbet would cover it in a featured article and clear up the issues, because he has all that power and influence and friends in high places and all.
</hint>

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 19:38 UTC (Wed) by wcooley (guest, #1233) [Link] (1 responses)

I seem to recall the news has been covered in the weekly issues several times.

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 8, 2004 6:20 UTC (Thu) by raytd (guest, #4823) [Link]

Yeah, i know that the initial dispute was covered and the possibility of forks and a fragmented user base were pondered, but that's not exactly what i was getting at.

I may be mistaken, but I have my suspicions that there was a hell of a lot more going on between Keith Packard, David Dawes and the other X developers than so-called governance issues and personality conflicts. I for one want to know what it was.

IMHO, disputes like this are indicative of future problems in the process of F/OSS development, and I'd like to know what the problem really was so that similar situations can be avoided (if possible).

Oh well, I guess if I might have the answers I seek were I more involved.

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 15:23 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

Funny thing. As I was reading over the press release, the song "Ding, Dong, The Witch is Dead" kept floating through my mind.

I hope they don't lose too many developers with this change. Anyway, maybe we'll see some exciting things happen with X in the future. Maybe even an end to the recurring X is [slow|bloated|ancient|decrepit] and needs to be replaced by [wx|Y|GGI|berlin|qtopia] theme.

X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

Posted Apr 7, 2004 17:26 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

Hopefully X.org will have the resources to update the documentation a bit. I'm still using the X11R5 Xlib reference manual by Ardian Nye, supplemented with freedesktop.org and a few other online resources. Having all the documentation up to date and in one place would be spiffy.

Where are the O'Reilly books?

Posted Apr 7, 2004 18:28 UTC (Wed) by ggoebel (guest, #4487) [Link]

It's been a year since O'Reilly issued a press release stating that they would make the out-of-print X books available under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Where are they? I can only find a couple Motif, XView, and Openlook books at O'Reilly's Open Book Project

It'd be nice if x.org could use the O'Reilly books as the base from which to update their documentation...

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 7, 2004 18:39 UTC (Wed) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (23 responses)

I thought only the X Consortium controlled the X11 revision numbers?
I thought that X.org was the Free Dekstop people and that x.org was the
X Consortium. Are they really the same organization?

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 7, 2004 19:04 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (22 responses)

Even better question: how can X11r6.7 be based on X11r6.6 from the same organization if this
is that organization's first release? :-)

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 7, 2004 19:52 UTC (Wed) by Centove (guest, #1887) [Link]

You're trying to make sense of all the different X11 versions? You must be mad!

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 0:42 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (20 responses)

X.org has been releasing X versions all along, which XFree86 has been
taking and incorporating into their distributions. If you look at an
XFree86 distribution, it will have a set of release notes for the X.org
portion as well as the main release notes. It has been X.org's versions
of things like xrdb, xterm, xfontsel, etc. which you get if you get
XFree86. With this release, X.org has started releasing complete
distributions, including the stuff that XFree86 would formerly have
added. The last like this was done, the organization doing it was still
the X Consortium, so this is the first complete X distribution by X.org,
despite the fact that they've made a number of previous incomplete
distributions. The odd part is mainly that they've kept the same version
numbering when going from the incomplete distribution intended for
repackaging to the complete one intended for end users.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 0:51 UTC (Thu) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (5 responses)

I see. So X.Org is the "new" X Consortium after being dormant for many
years. I remember downloading X11R5 and compiling it for Ultrix and
later X11R6 for various systems. So it wasn't that the old ones weren't
intended for end users but the idea of an end user has changed a bit over
time.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 1:43 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (4 responses)

>I see. So X.Org is the "new" X Consortium after being dormant for many
>years.
"dormant" doesn't seem to describe it properly.
Perhaps "resurrected" is more apt: there's some
loss of continuity in action, but the players
are still the same.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 5:50 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (3 responses)

There are a lot of people involved in X.Org who weren't involved in the X
Consortium for many reasons. Also, X.Org is far more open than the old XC.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 9:19 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (2 responses)

>There are a lot of people involved in X.Org who weren't involved in the X
>Consortium for many reasons. Also, X.Org is far more open than the old XC.
I see that comment ("more open") too often without substantiation.
As for "a lot of people" - still no. Same people, different name.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 12:45 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (1 responses)

Here's a start: myself, Egbert Eich, Mike Harris, Matthias Ettrich, Kevin Martin,
Stuart Anderson ... to my knowledge, none of these people were involved with the
X Consortium.

Oh, and as for the openness? Join the lists, and the organisation. Nominate for
the board or architecture group. Jump on the calls. Read the minutes of the calls
if you can't jump on. Anyone can do this.

Hell, hack on the code. The CVS repository, mailing lists, and bug tracking
system are all out there in the open. This wasn't true of the X Consortium, and
wasn't even true of XFree86 until very, very recently.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 12:58 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link]

um - no. You're misunderstanding. Control was defined at the outset.
It'll take time to determine if it is open, or "open". Since there
have been no adverse events, it is meaningless to talk about how well
the proposed structure is doing.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 12:28 UTC (Thu) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (13 responses)

>X.org has been releasing X versions all along, which XFree86 has been
>taking and incorporating into their distributions. If you look at an
>XFree86 distribution, it will have a set of release notes for the X.org
>portion as well as the main release notes. It has been X.org's versions
>of things like xrdb, xterm, xfontsel, etc. which you get if you get
>XFree86. With this release, X.org has started releasing complete.

sorry, that is not true.
not even close.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 15:26 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (8 responses)

Well thanks for that informative post -- things are much clearer now. ;-)

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 16:50 UTC (Thu) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (7 responses)

Since most of the comment was either misleading,
or incorrect, there was not much to elaborate upon.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 16:56 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (6 responses)

So, um, if you believe the assertions made to be factually incorrect, and you believe yourself
to have proper factual information...

and you aren't going to bother to post it (or link to it) for our edification...

um, why are you here again?

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 18:43 UTC (Thu) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (5 responses)

> um, why are you here again?
hmm - since you don't know how to use google, start here:

http://invisible-island.net/xterm/

(I don't _believe_ the comment to be incorrect, I _know_ it).

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 21:06 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (4 responses)

And, oddly, there's nothing on that page to connect it with either you *or* the history of the
orgnization presently known as X.org. I guess I should have expected the ad-hominem from
someone as helpful as yourself, though.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 0:10 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (3 responses)

> And, oddly, there's nothing on that page to connect it with either you
> *or* the history of the orgnization presently known as X.org. I guess
> I should have expected the ad-hominem from someone as helpful as
> yourself, though.
indeed. I gave you too much credit by assuming you could do your
own analysis (or had in fact read the comment to which I objected).

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 0:40 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (2 responses)

You know, it's strange.

There is occasionally this perception that I see amongst some members of the open source community that the donation of your time you make to the community somehow *entitles* you to be a smarmy prick in public.

It doesn't.

The page you pointed to doesn't even mention your name, much less does it contain any links that even *appear* to point to any information concerning whether X.org is the same as the Consortium. Certainly, it is neither more nor less blather than my own website, but at least I'm not pointing people to mine with a snotty off-hand remark.

So it didn't seem to be a fertile ground for any research (which, rather than analysis, seems to be what you're upbraiding me for not having done). In any event, I gave you three bites before calling you on your attitude; I'm done now.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 0:57 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link] (1 responses)

I pointed you at my home page for xterm. My name appears
on the FAQ and CHANGE LOG pages from that point. Similarly,
if you chose to google on xterm, you would find my name. If
you had bothered to read the comment, it stated (among
other things):

>It has been X.org's versions of things like xrdb, xterm,
>xfontsel, etc. which you get if you get XFree86.

which is completely untrue. Arguing about this proves that
you don't understand what you're saying, don't care if you
do, and are unlikely to change.

On the other hand, you are posting anonymously, and acting
precisely as you're complaining about.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 1:17 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Arguing about this proves that you don't understand what you're saying, don't care if you do, and are unlikely to change.

Well, no. I wasn't even arguing about the point you're standing on; didn't bring it up at all, not even once.

And as for anonymous...

well, I'll be dipped. This is about the only place I comment that doesn't hotlink my name to either an email address or a website; notwithstanding which, anyone who wanted to do their research could turn up a meat address and phone number for me with (frankly, far too) little effort.

But, you know, none of this meta-argument speaks at all to your orginal reply, which (clearly) other people found as useless as I did. I stand on my reputation, and by my comments.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 8, 2004 22:43 UTC (Thu) by richardfish (guest, #20657) [Link] (3 responses)

Ok, I'll agree that people should generally do some more research before posting. But posts like this are as bad as mis-information.

I am guessing that you are "Thomas E Dickey", the maintainer for xterm for XFree86. If so, you are in a better position than any of us to enlighten us on the relationship/history between X.org, the X Consortium, and XFree86. While I don't expect you to post a 300-page history-of-X here, a couple of sentances and URLs would have been helpful.

I'll post my best understanding of things. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I am wrong.

The X Window System is really a set of specifications that are versioned (X11R6 is X Windows System version 11 revision 6). Any vendors distributing "X Windows" should (must?) comply with those specifications.

The X Consortium maintained the specifications, backed by reference source code. In 1996 it transferred that job to The Open Group which formed X.org to take on the task. Now in 2004, that job will be done by the "X.Org Foundation", which is really just a name change so that it can call it's forked version of XFree86 "X.org". Are we confused yet?

Bottom line: they are not the same, but they do the same job.

References:
http://www.opengroup.org/tech/desktop/Press_Releases/xccloses.htm
http://www.x.org/XOrg_background.html

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 1:41 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link]

>Ok, I'll agree that people should generally do some more research before >posting. But posts like this are as bad as mis-information.
Not exactly. What's obvious to me may not be obvious to you.

I was not much interested in the slice dealing with the derivation of
X.Org from X/Open from X Consortium, but the statement that XFree86 only
distributes applications that are "X.Org" got my attention. Since about
a third of the applications are modified by XFree86 (and most of the
remaining ones were not touched by anyone since ~1998), it was worth
pointing out that it was incorrect. (Saying it was "X.Org" doubled
the points since "X.Org" dates after the related code).

There are other issues that come to mind, but I don't want to start
a new thread.

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 1:52 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link]

>The X Consortium maintained the specifications, backed by reference source >code. In 1996 it transferred that job to The Open Group which formed X.org >to take on the task. Now in 2004, that job will be done by the "X.Org >Foundation", which is really just a name change so that it can call it's >forked version of XFree86 "X.org". Are we confused yet?
Still a little confused: "X.Org" (the current one) dates from January.
The paperwork to set it up dates from last fall (September).

Is X.org the X Consortium?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 1:59 UTC (Fri) by tedickey (guest, #20738) [Link]

>I am guessing that you are "Thomas E Dickey", the maintainer for xterm for >XFree86.
yes
>If so, you are in a better position than any of us to enlighten us on the >relationship/history between X.org, the X Consortium, and XFree86. While I >don't expect you to post a 300-page history-of-X here, a couple of >sentances and URLs would have been helpful.
Probably not: describing the current X.org properly would require
some speculation on the dynamics of the situation. (I don't like
to speculate, and don't see any point in arguing about opinions).

There was a much-toned-down history of X on this website recently.
That's enough to get up to about a year ago. Current events are
harder to report (every reporter thinks he's a general).

X.org plans to replace monolithic with modular tree in longer term

Posted Apr 7, 2004 20:11 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

If I remember the discussions on the X.org mailing list correctly, this monolithic release is essentially only a stopgap measure—in the short term, they wanted to release something as close as possible to XFree86, as quickly as possible, to ensure that people have a stable platform to migrate to.

In the longer term, they are planning to split X up into a series of smaller packages for the server, different libraries, utility applications, etcetera. The distros want such a modular release very badly so that different parts of X can be updated independently. Apparently, many of these components are rapidly reaching maturity—they are not rewrites, after all, just a split of the existing code into pieces with a more modern build architecture (autotools vs. imake).

In the even longer term, Keith Packard's freedesktop.org X server, a substantially rewritten server compared to X11R6.7's, may replace the X server component, but that's apparently still pretty experimental.


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