XDC2012: Status report from the X.Org Board

On the first day of the 2012 X.Org Developers' Conference, Bart Massey kicked off a short presentation from the Board of Directors of the X.Org Foundation, running through the current status of the foundation and its recent achievements. He began by noting that, with much assistance from the Software Freedom Law Center, the foundation has now achieved 501(c)(3) tax status as a US nonprofit. In addition, the foundation is now a member of the Open Invention Network (OIN). Although the foundation can't offer any patents to OIN (because it owns none), "we do have a lot of prior art". Much of what the X developers are doing is innovative and potentially patentable [by others], and "if you want that not to happen, you should talk to us and OIN".

X.Org did not have any Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects approved this year, and Bart noted the need for a rethink about how to approach GSoC in the future. On the other hand, in the last year there were four successful projects (and one failed project) in X.Org's own similar "Endless Vacation of Code" (EVoC) program, and all of the successful EVoC students were funded to travel to Nuremberg for the conference. (A session on day one of the conference reviewed the status of the EVoC program, looking at the goals of the program and how its implementation could be improved; video of the session can be found here.)

In the two days immediately preceding the conference, there was a book sprint. This followed on from an earlier book sprint in March, which worked on the creation of a developer's guide that was to some extent client-side focused. The more recent sprint aimed to complete Stéphane Marchesin's Driver Development Guide. There are now 119 pages of documentation that is still rough and in need of editing, but a version should be on the wiki in a few days. He noted that one of the explicit points of adding more documentation was to attract new X developers by lowering the barriers to understanding the X system.

Bart noted that the foundation currently faces a number of challenges. The financial organization is better than it has been for a while, but the once large budget surplus is now starting to run down, to the point where some real effort needs to be spent on fund raising. In a brief treasurer's report, Stuart Kreitman expanded on this point: at the current rate of spending (US$20k to US$30k per year), there's about three year's buffer. The old days when several large UNIX workstation vendors gave large donations have—along with those vendors—long gone. New funding sources will be needed, and X.Org may need to rely more on smaller donations.

Bart pointed out a number of other challenges that X faces. As with many projects, but perhaps especially notable because X is such a fundamental part of our day-to-day infrastructure, X needs more developers, and Bart emphasized the need for ideas on how to attract new developers. There remain some infrastructure problems to be resolved (notably, the X.Org web site was down a number of times in the lead-up to the conference). Then there is the whole "future of Wayland thing". Although the Board does not set technical directions, "it's clear that Wayland is part of the X world", and the question is how to support the transition to a potentially "Wayland world".

But, notwithstanding these and other challenges, Bart stressed that "I couldn't be more excited about what's happening", and certainly the level of interest and detail in the three days of presentations seem to justify his excitement.

A pointer to a video that includes the status session can be found here.