X.Org Foundation
Nonprofit organization
The X.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation chartered to research, develop, support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics stack. This includes, but is not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa, Wayland, and X11 and its primary implementation, the X.Org Server.
01Organization
The X.Org Foundation was founded on 22 January 2004.
The modern X.Org Foundation came into being when the body that oversaw X standards and published the official reference implementation joined forces with former XFree86 developers. The creation of the Foundation marked a radical change in the governance of X (see the history of the X Window System). Whereas the stewards of X since 1988 (including the previous X.Org, part of The Open Group) had been vendor organizations, the Foundation is led by software developers and using community development on the bazaar model, which relies on outside involvement. Membership is also open to individuals, with corporate membership being in the form of sponsorship.
In 2005 the X.Org Foundation applied for 501(c)(3) non-profit status. In 2012, with the help of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the Foundation gained the status. In 2013, the Foundation lost the status because they did not fill a tax form (it had no income to declare and did not get any info from SFLC) and in the same year it regained the status, after clearing up the issue. In 2016, the X.Org Foundation joined Software in the Public Interest (SPI) who would manage the bureaucracy.
In 2019, freedesktop.org formally joined the X.Org Foundation.
In 2023, The X.Org Foundation decided to join Software Freedom Conservancy, which took over the bureaucratic roles SPI had had previously.
02Fields of activity
The X.Org Foundation does not provide technical guidance, roadmaps or deadlines, releases or supervision of any kind.
The X.Org Foundation does provide communication tools (in relation with freedesktop.org), an annual physical meeting and money to help developing the free graphics stack.
The X.Org Foundation organizes the annual X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC) and sponsors students to work on X.Org as part of their X.Org Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC) initiative.
The X.Org Server and xlib are the reference implementation of the X protocol, and is commonly used on Linux and UNIX; it is the fundamental technology underlying both the modern GNOME and KDE desktops and older CDE desktop environment; applications written for any of these environments can be run simultaneously.
Along with reference implementation of X protocol, the X.org Foundation hosts development of several utilities and example applications, including xcalc on-screen calculator, xclock simple digital and analog clock, xedit text editor, xload periodically updated histogram of the average system load, xterm terminal emulator, and xeyes which shows, by default, a pair of eyes that follow the mouse cursor.
As of April 2013, the Board of Directors consisted of Alan Coopersmith, Alex Deucher, Martin Peres, Matt Dew, Matthias Hopf, Peter Hutterer (Secretary), Stuart Kreitman (Treasurer), and Keith Packard.
03X.Org Developer's Conference
The physical meeting is the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC/XDS), which is organized once a year, around September/October and alternates between North America and Europe and lasts for 3 days. The board of directors can cover the travel and accommodation expenses to the developers who couldn't attend an X.Org-related conference (XDC or FOSDEM?) otherwise.
Conference history
| Event and year | Date | Host city | Venue | Resources | Themes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XDC2004 | 28, 30 April | Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA | Cambridge Research Laboratory | ||
| XDC2005 | 12, 14 February | Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA | Cambridge Research Laboratory | X.Org Server, Cairo, xephyr, ... | |
| XDC2006 | 8, 10 February | Santa Clara, California, USA | Sun Microsystems campus | Xgl, | |
| XDC2007 | 7, 9 February | Menlo Park, California, USA | TechShop Menlo Park facility | ||
| XDS2007 | 10, 12 September | Cambridge, United Kingdom | Clare College | ||
| XDC2008 | 16, 18 April | Mountain View, California, USA | Google campus | ||
| XDS2008 | 3, 5 September | Edinburgh, United Kingdom | Edinburgh Zoo | XKB, MPX, ... | |
| XDC2009 | 28, 30 September | Portland, Oregon, USA | University Place Hotel, Portland State University | ||
| XDS2010 | 16, 18 September | Toulouse, France | Toulouse 1 University Capitole | ||
| XDC2011 | 12, 14 September | Chicago, Illinois, USA | McCormick Tribune Campus Center | ||
| XDC2012 | 19, 21 September | Nuremberg, Germany | SUSE campus | ||
| XDC2013 | 23, 25 September | Portland, Oregon, USA | University Place Hotel, Portland State University | DRM, DRI3, XCB, nouveau, etc. | |
| XDC2014 | 8, 10 October | Bordeaux, France | Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI) | Wayland, Tizen, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, Mesa 3D, etc. | |
| XDC2015 | 16, 18 September | Toronto, Canada | Seneca@York campus, Seneca College | GLSL compiler, Nouveau, libinput, Freedreno, Etnaviv, amdgpu, drm, etc. | |
| XDC2016 | 20, 22 September | Helsinki, Finland | Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences | ||
| XDC2017 | 20, 22 September | Mountain View, California, USA | Google Bldg 1055 | ||
| XDC2018 | 26, 28 September | A Coruña, Galicia (Spain) | Computer Science Faculty of University of A Coruña | ||
| XDC2019 | 2, 4 October | Montreal, Canada | Concordia University Conference Centre | [link removed] | |
| XDC2020 | 16, 18 September | Virtual | Virtual | Archived 7 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine | |
| XDC2021 | 15, 17 September | Virtual | Virtual | ||
| XDC2022 | 4, 6 October | Minneapolis, Minnesota | University of St. Thomas | ||
| XDC2023 | 17, 19 October | Coruña, Spain | PALEXCO | ||
| XDC2024 | 9, 11 October | Montréal, Canada | Concordia University Conference Center | ||
| XDC2025 | 29 September , 1 October | Vienna, Austria | TU Wien |
04X.Org Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC)
X.Org Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC) is a Google Summer of Code (GSoC)-like project initiated in 2008 funded by the X.Org Foundation. It allows students to participate to X.Org-related projects during their vacation, at any time of the year.
An example of an accepted EVoC project from 2014 is to work on nouveau, the free and open-source graphics device driver for GeForce-branded GPUs. NVA3/5/8 are the engineering names of the Tesla-based GT215, GT216 and GT218.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “X.Org Foundation”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- X.Org Logo.svg by User:Sven, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Xclock animation linux.gif by Morn, MIT
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