glibc fork ?

[Adam Jackson]

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 22:59 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> (*) though arguably XFree86 is the failed fork and the X.Org Consortium is
> the legitimate successor of the original maintainer, but when you look at
> the actual code flow, the latest X.Org X11 releases are clearly forked from
> XFree86

I don't think we ever pretended otherwise.  We had to change the name of
the server and config binaries (and default config file) for trademark
reasons, but the code still has a directory called hw/xfree86/ and a ton
of functions named xf86SomethingOrOther.

But really, XFree86 is not a failed fork.  The Consortium, like the rest
of the unix industry, completely underestimated the PC and free
software.  XFree86 did tremendous work enhancing the nascent 386 port in
X11R5, and basically from R6.4 onwards XFree86 were the only people
doing any interesting development on X.  That may sound recent, but
remember that 6.4 was eleven years ago.  For the next six years, XFree86
4.x was the de facto standard.  If the goal was "X on PC hardware",
XFree86 completely nailed it.

Also, just to clarify, the current organization is the X.Org Foundation,
a non-profit [1] scientific charity with no employees.  The original
Consortium was a membership corporation much like the Khronos Group
(current stewards of OpenGL among much else), with a technical staff
responsible for the majority of the work on X from R6 to R6.3 inclusive.
After them, de jure stewardship was technically in the hands of The Open
Group until the initial Foundation release of R6.7 in 2004, though de
facto leadership was XFree86.  While the Foundation did acquire the
trademarks from TOG, it is not a spinoff or direct descendant of either
TOG or the Consortium in a legal sense.

[1] - I'm almost certain this is true.  We were an LLC initially, which
was a terrible idea, but istr hearing at a recent board meeting that
we'd finally switched to 501(c)3.  So yay for that.

- ajax
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