David Dawes (born 3 December 1964), is one of the founders of the

XFree86 XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the X ...

project. He was one of four people who started it in 1992 (together with David Wexelblat, Glenn Lai, and Jim Tsillas), and became the project president in 1994. The XFree86 Project used the MIT/X11 license until 2004, when Dawes, as the XFree86 president, decided to license XFree86 4.4 under the newly devised XFree86 License 1.1. The new license includes a "credit clause" similar to the old BSD License advertising clause. The

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

determined that the new license was incompatible with the version 2 of

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. The move was protested by free software leaders such as

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

and

Theo de Raadt Theo de Raadt (; ; born May 19, 1968) is a South African-born software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects and was also a founding member of NetBSD. In 2004, De Raadt wo ...

. While Dawes explained this as an attempt to make sure the XFree86 developers get their due credit (apparently in response to the ''Xouvert'' fork), the decision was contested in the XFree86 community, notably by

Jim Gettys Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American computer programmer. He was involved in multiple computer related projects. Activity Gettys worked at DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Sof ...

and

Keith Packard Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the l ...

, and the dissenters subsequently forked the project into the

X.Org Server X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve a ...

. The fork superseded XFree86, as other projects found the new license unacceptable. Dawes still heads the XFree86 Project and maintains XFree86 without corporate sponsorships; however, the last release of the software was in 2008. Dawes also runs his own small private company called X-Oz Technologies, which provides project management and consulting services.

References

External links

Home page

Page discussing the effects of XFree86 license changes

(Matthew Arnison, CAT TV, June 1999)

X Window System people 1964 births Living people {{compu-bio-stub