The first X.Org release [LWN.net]

The X.Org Foundation has announced the release of X11R6.7. This is, in some sense, a relatively minor release X.Org

with little in the way of new features (see the release notes for the details). It is, however, a milestone in the development of the X Window System, and worthy of note.

Readers of LWN will be familiar with the tensions which have stressed the XFree86 project over the last year. There have long been disagreements over how the development of X should be managed, and core developers have been leaving the project for some time. The issue came to a head with the the adoption of the XFree86 1.1 license, which is widely seen as being incompatible with the GPL. That move led to the formation of the X.org Foundation under the umbrella of FreeDesktop.org. It also led to many distributors saying that they would not incorporate the XFree86 4.4 release.

The X11R6.7 release is the first official release from X.Org, though some distributions (e.g. Fedora Core 2 Test 2) have incorporated pre-release versions from the Foundation. It is intended to be a transitional release, a way for distributors to move over to the new code base. As such, it deliberately does not include much in the way of radical new changes. There will be a couple more X11R6.x releases this year which will add more new stuff.

The real plan for the future, however, is to split the X release into a number of components, including the server, client libraries, and applications. This split will allow each part of the system to progress at its own pace; it will be possible to release support for the latest graphics hardware without dragging along all of the applications as well. The X hackers have all kinds of schemes for reworking the server and the X protocol to better support modern 3D hardware to to get Linux, finally, out of its old, two-dimensional world.

Conventional wisdom says that forks in free software projects are a bad thing. But one of the valuable aspects of free software is that it can be forked. The X fork looks like a necessary one; with luck it will lead to a reinvigorated development process and good things for the future Linux desktop.

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The first X.Org release

Posted Apr 8, 2004 14:15 UTC (Thu) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]

Conventional wisdom says that forks in free software projects are a bad thing.

Of course you're using this in accord with Galbraith's coinage: the conventional wisdom is the old, tired, no longer questioned beliefs of those whose minds are more comfortable with what they learned when they were young than in the way things really are now. In particular, a lot of folks confuse the effects of forks in free (or even in open source) software, which are mild and generally beneficial, with the very different situation that obtains when the source is proprietary and hidden. As you go on to say, this is an example of how the ability to fork when source code is open and unencumbered solves what would otherwise be difficult problems; it causes problems only for those who want to control the development in a way that ignores the interests of the community.