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2.2 Disbanding of the Core Team
XFree86 used to have a Core Team which was made up of experienced developers, selected for their merits. Due to limited innovation capacity the XFree86 Core Team voted to disband itself, on December 30, 2003, effective the following day.
Earlier in 2003 Keith Packard, a noted X Window System developer, was removed from the XFree86 Core Team. The Core Team claim this was for conspiracy: Keith had been trying to fork the XFree86 project, working inside the project, while trying to attract core developers to a new X Server project of his own making. Packard denied this, but the Core Team produced mail conversations he had had with other developers on the subject.
2.3 Licensing controversy
XFree86 4.4 was released in February 2004 with a change to the license: the addition of an advertising clause, similar to that in the old version of the BSD license. This has led to a great deal of controversy, and XFree86 4.4 being excluded from many Linux distributions and from OpenBSD. Some projects, such as OpenBSD, are forking XFree86 from version 4.4 RC2, the last version under the old license.
3 Forks of XFree86
3.1 freedesktop.org Xserver
Keith Packard created XWin, a forum for the betterment of X and specifically XFree86. The XWin forum no longer exists and users are now directed to freedesktop.org. Keith Packard began a totally new development project based on the X Window System under the name Xserver, hosted by freedesktop.org. Xserver uses the Kdrive API driver model. The authors intend it to be the next generation of X server, following a different direction to XFree86.
3.2 The XOrg Foundation Open Source Public Implementation of X11
The XOrg Foundation Open Source Public Implementation of X11 is the official reference implementation of X11, produced by X.Org. The first version, X11R6.7.0, is a fork from XFree86 version 4.4 RC2, with X11R6.6 changes merged in. Now it's at version X11R6.8.1, which adds plenty of new extensions, drivers and fixes. It is not encumbered by the license changes mentioned earlier. It is also hosted by freedesktop.org. The XOrg Server has been adopted by Fedora Core, Slackware, Mandrake Linux, Gentoo Linux, and FreeBSD 5.
3.3 Xouvert
An experimental branch of the XFree86 server code, Xouvert , has also been announced, although this has shown no recent activity.
4 See also
5 External links
Free software
X Window System
