Differences between version 6 and predecessor to the previous major change of XFree86.
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| Newer page: | version 6 | Last edited on Tuesday, February 17, 2004 1:00:18 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
| Older page: | version 5 | Last edited on Thursday, December 18, 2003 1:28:49 pm | by PhilHarper | Revert |
@@ -21,4 +21,23 @@
XFree86 version 4.3 (released Feb/Mar 2003) has lots of cool features. Some of the notable ones are:
* ability to configure which keys are used for changing virtual terminals (used to be hard-coded to ctrl+alt+ (F1 - F6) and which keys are used for changing screen resolutions (used to be hard-coded to ctrl+alt+ (KP_+ and KP_-).
* The [Cygwin] port can now run "rootless". This means that you can use Microsoft Windows as your window manager, whereas previously cygwin needed one window and ran all x applications within that single window. This was the biggest advantage that commercial win32 xservers had over the free ones, until now :)
* AddToMe
+
+
+----
+
+!History
+;From the bottom of the X (7) manpage -: The X Window System standard was originally developed at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and all rights thereto were assigned to the X Consortium on January 1, 1994. X Consortium, Inc. closed its doors on December 31, 1996. All rights to the X Window System have been assigned to the Open Software Foundation.
+
+;From the bottom of the XFree86 (7) manpage -: XFree86 was originally based on X386 1.2 by Thomas Roell, which was contributed to the then X Consortium's X11R5 distribution by SGCS.
+
+When the Open Group changed the licence of their X11R6.4 release to be non-[Free] in 1998, the XFree86 project kept their own fork under the more liberal license, and had much more active developer support.
+(See this [debian-devel post|http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/debian-devel-199804/msg00080.html]).
+Also, [RMS] talks about this in his essay on CopyLeft vs non-CopyLeft (but still free) licenses at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/x.html.
+The XFree86 implementation of the [X11] protocol is the one that survived.
+
+In 2004, the XFree86 leadership [announced a change|http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2004-January/001892.html] to their license, introducing the documentation/advertising clause of the old-style [BSDLicense] (now removed from [BSD] software) to their upcoming XFree86 4.4 release. Because this is interpreted to be incompatible with [GPL]'d software, this release will not be included in major Linux distributions:
+* Mandrake are sticking with v 4.3 (http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/cooker/2004-02/msg04596.php)
+* Debian are looking towards the FreeDesktop fork of XFree86 by Keith Packard (http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/debian-legal-200402/msg00116.html).
+
+It is probable that in the near/mid-term future, the FreeDesktop [XServer] will become the de-facto software used on Linux distributions.
