X.Org Foundation

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.

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 (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.

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 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.

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

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 XDC2020 16–18 September Virtual Virtual 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

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.

X.Org Foundation

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