On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 22:59 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: > (*) though arguably XFree86 is the failed fork and the X.Org Consortium is > the legitimate successor of the original maintainer, but when you look at > the actual code flow, the latest X.Org X11 releases are clearly forked from > XFree86 I don't think we ever pretended otherwise. We had to change the name of the server and config binaries (and default config file) for trademark reasons, but the code still has a directory called hw/xfree86/ and a ton of functions named xf86SomethingOrOther. But really, XFree86 is not a failed fork. The Consortium, like the rest of the unix industry, completely underestimated the PC and free software. XFree86 did tremendous work enhancing the nascent 386 port in X11R5, and basically from R6.4 onwards XFree86 were the only people doing any interesting development on X. That may sound recent, but remember that 6.4 was eleven years ago. For the next six years, XFree86 4.x was the de facto standard. If the goal was "X on PC hardware", XFree86 completely nailed it. Also, just to clarify, the current organization is the X.Org Foundation, a non-profit [1] scientific charity with no employees. The original Consortium was a membership corporation much like the Khronos Group (current stewards of OpenGL among much else), with a technical staff responsible for the majority of the work on X from R6 to R6.3 inclusive. After them, de jure stewardship was technically in the hands of The Open Group until the initial Foundation release of R6.7 in 2004, though de facto leadership was XFree86. While the Foundation did acquire the trademarks from TOG, it is not a spinoff or direct descendant of either TOG or the Consortium in a legal sense. [1] - I'm almost certain this is true. We were an LLC initially, which was a terrible idea, but istr hearing at a recent board meeting that we'd finally switched to 501(c)3. So yay for that. - ajax
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