XFree86

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XFree86 used to be the most popular implementation of the X Window System. But after the events of 2004 all the current distributions abruptly dropped it, and development of it slowed to a halt. This article is to explain the confusing process that lead to the popular exodus from XFree86.

old page is old == 2004

1 X.Org and XFree86
2 Keith Packard
3 The X.Org Foundation
4 XFree86's Big Mistake
5 Links

X.Org and XFree86

X.Org is the official home of the X Window System. In the early 1990s, most implementations of X were commercial, and the companies that created them were on the X Consortium. The X Consortium shut down in 1996; in 1999, X.Org was founded in its place. XFree86 was a free implementation of X; it was therefore the most popular implementation used on Linux, and in fact most of the commercial implementations died out due to its popularity.

Keith Packard

Keith Packard was a core developer of XFree86. He made large contributions to the project, but was frustrated by the closed and limited model of development. As a result, he decided to make a major fork of XFree86. This was bad news for his position at the Core Team; they reacted haughtily and kicked him off.

Keith kept on developing his fork, which he hosted at freedesktop.org, a website for shared standards and software for the Linux desktop. But the drama created by the XFree86 Core Team tipped many people off to the fact that XFree86 development was being bogged down by this sort of pettiness. Already, Keith's fork was showing off many neat, Mac OS X-like features that had been waiting a long time to be applied to the main XFree86 tree.

The X.Org Foundation

Remember that XFree86 is merely a free implementation of the X Window System. The official X Window System version, then X11R6.6, had not changed since 2001. At Linux Expo 2004, X.Org announced a reorganization, adding developers from open-source-focused companies such as Sun, Red Hat, Trolltech, CodeWeavers, and so forth. This new structure was dubbed the "X.Org Foundation".

X.Org adapted the XFree86 code, which was under a free license, and scrapped their old reference code. The new X.Org code was also to be hosted on freedesktop.org.

The reorganization announced on 22 January 2004. On 29 January 2004, the developers of XFree86 changed the license of their code.

XFree86's Big Mistake

The new license was apparently a direct reaction to the X.Org announcement. XFree86's new license put annoying restrictions on people other than the "XFree86 Project" developing their software; namely, it adopted an advertising clause that forced non-project developers to credit the XFree86 Project in their documentation.

This change was an issue to most people who care about licensing in Linux -- that is to say, a good part of the Linux community. By April 2004, X11R6.7 had been released by the X.Org Foundation, and already many Linux distributions were rushing to switch to X.Org.

Keith Packard joined the X.Org development team, and many other developers followed his lead. On 9 September 2004, X11R6.8 was released, with significant improvements over the XFree86 codebase. By now, many distributions, such as Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, and OpenBSD, have announced that they will be using X.Org in the future and have abandoned XFree86.