Some tidbits from XDC

The X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) is a three-day, one-track event with presentations covering many different parts of the graphics stack. This year it was held September 23–25 at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon—home of Voodoo Doughnuts, which were provided daily. XDC is an intense experience and this year's edition will lead to a few more articles in the coming weeks. There were also a few shorter sessions with some news and plans that seem worth reporting on here.

Non-profit status

X.Org Foundation board member Peter Hutterer reported on the state of the foundation. The most recent news about the foundation was that it had lost its 501(c)(3) (US) non-profit status in August. Hutterer was happy to report that had all been reversed. With help from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), which helped the foundation become a non-profit in 2012, the foundation was able to regain its status. The paperwork was "still in transit", he said, but the non-profit status was restored.

Part of the problem that led to the revocation of the non-profit status was that it is a lot of work to maintain a 501(c)(3) organization. The members of the foundation board are not lawyers or accountants, he said, and some of them are not even living in the US, which makes it that much more difficult. So the board decided to look into organizations that manage free software projects, foundations, and the like. Umbrella organizations like the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and Software in the Public Interest (SPI) are set up to handle much of the paperwork for various types of projects.

The board has voted that SPI is the right umbrella organization for the X.Org Foundation. That switch is not finalized as it may require a vote of the X.Org membership, Hutterer said. The board will be consulting with the SFLC and looking at the by-laws to determine that. Assuming the change is made, SPI would take 5% of any donations made to the foundation for the work that it does, which "seems fair", he said.

The foundation has "a slab of money" that remains from a number of years ago, when it was getting donations of $100,000 or so per year. It uses that money to put on XDC and to sponsor the travel of several participants (four this year, including a Google Summer of Code student and an LWN editor). It also funds GSoC students and participants in the X.Org Endless Vacation of Code program. The pile of money is enough to last for another four or five years, Hutterer said, before the foundation needs to consider doing some fundraising—something that's never been done since he became involved.

The foundation is also moving banks after HSBC closed its account for unclear reasons. "Banks are fun", Hutterer said with a laugh. The current plan is to move to Bank of America, he said.

The Board of Directors consists of eight people and four of those seats turn over every year. There are 78 members of the foundation, which is "lots better than it was a couple of years ago". Hutterer strongly encouraged those present to think about joining, which allows voting in elections and has a few other benefits.

X server 1.15 planning

Keith Packard took the floor on the first day to discuss plans for the X server 1.15 release. It was supposed to have been released the week of XDC, but in August he and others realized that the release itself was "really boring". He asked the assembled developers if there were any features due in 1.15 that they were "desperate to have". Hutterer mentioned that having touch input working would be nice, but Packard noted that those changes had been backported to 1.14.

In fact, as far as he knows, all of the security, stability, and usability bug fixes have been added to 1.14. The 1.14 release manager has been making minor releases with those changes, which are, of course, ABI-compatible with 1.14—unlike 1.15. At this point, Packard said, 1.15 looks like "1.14 plus an ABI change".

There are, however, many features that are awaiting the release of 1.15 before they get merged. So, an idea that had been batted around on IRC was to delay the release of 1.15 until it had some features of note. Those features might include a rewrite of the Xephyr nested X server (that deleted "many thousands of lines of code, which is what we do best at Xorg", Packard said, pronouncing the last word as "zorg"), Packard's own DRI3 and Present extensions which are getting close to being ready to merge, some XWayland changes, Adam Jackson's GLX rewrite (which removes around 40,000 lines of code), and possibly others.

Packard would talk about DRI3 and Present later in the conference, as would Jackson about the GLX rewrite, so the final decision would be made after those discussions. All of the proposed features seemed like they would plausibly be ready in time for a code freeze at the end of October. The normal pattern would be for a two-month stabilization period after that, putting the release of 1.15 at the end of the year. "A Christmas present", Jackson suggested.

An informal straw poll of those in the room found all in favor of the proposed change, but there wasn't any real emotion one way or the other. "Consensus by apathy", one developer suggested, which is a "hallmark of X.Org" added another—to chuckles around the room. Packard encouraged anyone with additional features they would like to see in 1.15 to "let us know". In the end, the X.Org calendar shows a final 1.15 release scheduled for December 25.

Links to the slides and videos for most of the sessions can be found from the XDC schedule page.

[I would like to thank the X.Org Foundation for travel assistance to Portland for XDC.]