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 3D, Wayland and the X Window System and its primary implementation, the X.Org Server.

Organization

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 The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is an organization that provides ''pro bono'' legal representation and related services to not-for-profit developers of free software/open source software. It was launched in February 2005 with Eben Moglen a ...

(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 2014, the X.Org Foundation announced that they were joining Software in the Public Interest (SPI) who would manage the bureaucracy. According to an October 2018 article published by Phoronix,

freedesktop.org freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for Free software, free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland (display server protocol), Wayland on Linux and other Uni ...

will be officially joining the X.Org Foundation.

Fields 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

), an annual physical meeting and money to help developing the free graphics stack. * a physical annual meeting (X.Org Developer's Conference) * Travel sponsorship: * The X.Org Foundation participated as an organization of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This allows students to participate to X.Org-related projects over the summer . *Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC): EVoC is a GSoC-like project, 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. * Communication: Google+ and Twitter Google+/YouTube: Store and/or link to talk videos, slides, blog articles or G+ posts related to projects under our umbrella (Martin Peres); Twitter: Mostly security issues, random updates (Alan Coopersmith). * There is an X.Org developer guide written by Alan Coopersmith, Matt Dew and the X.Org team; edited by Bart Massey at https://www.x.org/wiki/guide/ The X.Org Foundation organizes the annual

X.Org Developer's Conference 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 p ...

(XDC) and sponsors students to work on X.Org as part of their

X.Org Endless Vacation of Code 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 p ...

(EVoC) initiative. The X.Org Server and xlib are the reference implementation of the

X protocol The X Window System core protocolRobert W. Scheifler and James Gettys: ''X Window System: Core and extension protocols, X version 11, releases 6 and 6.1'', Digital Press 1996, RFC 1013Grant EdwardsAn Introduction to X11 User Interfaces/ref> is the ...

, and is commonly used on Linux and UNIX; it is the fundamental technology underlying both the modern

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

and

KDE KDE is an international Free software movement, free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-know ...

desktops and older

CDE CDE may refer to: Education * California Department of Education * Career Development Event, a type of contest sponsored by the National FFA Organization * Center for Data Engineering, IIIT Hyderabad * Center for Distance Education at University of ...

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 An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics. The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-sized ...

, xclock simple digital and analog clock, xedit text editor, xload periodically updated

histogram A histogram is an approximate representation of the distribution of numerical data. The term was first introduced by Karl Pearson. To construct a histogram, the first step is to " bin" (or "bucket") the range of values—that is, divide the ent ...

of the average

system load In UNIX computing, the system load is a measure of the amount of computational work that a computer system performs. The load average represents the average system load over a period of time. It conventionally appears in the form of three numb ...

, xterm terminal emulator, and xeyes which shows a pair of eyes that follow the

mouse cursor In human–computer interaction, a cursor is an indicator used to show the current position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device. The mouse cursor is also called a point ...

. 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.

X.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

X.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.

References

External links

* {{Software in the Public Interest 501(c)(3) organizations Free software project foundations in the United States X Window System fr:X.Org#Fondation X.Org