Wayland Archive

Federico Mena-Quintero continues his coverage from XDevConf regarding X11 technologies.

There is a three day X Developer's meeting from Wednesday, April 28, through Friday, April 30, 2004, at the Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ximian's Federico Mena-Quintero was there and outlined the talks of Keith Packard & Jim Gettys regarding where X11 should go.

X.Org Foundation today announced 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 XFree86 Project Inc.

David Dawes seems a little suspicious of the underwhelming support for XFree86 by Linux distributors: "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 XFree86 Project released XFree86 4.4.0 for seventeen platforms. Release notes here.

For the past year, there has been a slow and steady stream of news events regarding XFree86, X11, or new X server implementations. To those not paying close attention (and even those who are), the meaning of some of these events may not be clear. In this brief article, I attempt to share my impression on what the changes mean for users of free software on the desktop. It appears that XFree86 is in some turmoil, and it may leave some to infer that free desktop systems will suffer.

The XFree86 Project recently announced their final RC before the release of XFree86 4.4.

The XFree86 Project modified their license (fully effective as of the upcoming 4.4.0 release). The updated license change applies to the base XFree86 license, and to source files that explicitly carry a copyright notice in the name of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Copyrights and licenses in the names of others will not be affected by this change, however some fear that these changes might be GPL-incompatible.

In a press conference held today at LinuxWorld 2004 in New York, members of the old X consortium, some members of the disbanded XFree86 core developer group, and Havoc Pennington of freedesktop.org announced that X.org and XFree86 have essentially merged, and that the reformed group is working together to bring "not just more eye candy but new functionality" to the X server for Linux and Unix. Our Take: We wonder what this means for Keith Packard's X implementation hosted at fd.o. Update: Apparently the above is not accurate, only a few (one?) developers joined X.org.

The XFree86 core team has announced that it is disbanding. What does this mean for the pending XFree86 4.4.0 release which was going to be out in January? (currently the latest version is 4.4-RC2). We hope that someone puts a release together to give something new to users before freedesktop.org's XWin server comes out at the end of 2004 or early 2005.

The first milestone in the Xouvert roadmap has been reached. The first version of the new replacement X-server features patches from different places around the net and a cleanup to the default X-tree.

"This document attempts to give a sketch of the names and relationships of these technologies and projects, and a glimpse into their status and development. Some technologies have never proved themselves, and/or have been rendered obsolete by later development and are available primarily for legacy code. This document attempts to clarify much of this natural evolution and market selection." Read the X roadmap from Jim Gettys and await a long and interesting interview with freedesktop.org members on Monday, here, at OSNews.

"The freedesktop.org X hacking is low-profile unstableware at the moment, but one particular proposal interests me the most", Havoc Pennington (of Red Hat, Gnome and freedesktop.org fame) is writing on his dev blog. Havoc discusses the new features and explains the new levels of the 'modernization' of this XFree86 fork.

Cygwin is latest contributor on XFree86.org that gets pushed away by the behavior of some of its founding members and the dysfunctionality of XFree86.org. Hopefully, Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, Apple, Sun and others will create a fork (or join Xouvert, X2 or a more 'open' X11.org) in a way that allows truly open development and innovation in X in a faster pace than XFree86's maintainers have allowed so far.