View Source: XServer - Waikato Linux Users Group

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An X Server is a program that is responsible for drawing graphics on a machine's video.

Graphical applications (called "X Clients") use the [X11] protocol to talk to the X Server. This turns around the usual meaning of client and server, and the application may be running on a remote machine, and displaying on your local machine.

On [Linux] platforms, the [X11] implementation most commonly used is the [XOrg] reference implementation. (Previous versions of distributions used
the older [XFree86] implementation that XOrg is derived from).

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!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, the major Linux distributions are migrating to [Xorg | http://www.x.org/]

OS News has a [good summary|http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6157].

It is probable that in the near/mid-term future, one of the FreeDesktop [XServer]s will become the de-facto software used on Linux distributions. (See the FreeDesktop page for background on these servers).
18 pages link to XServer:
Last edited on Sunday, November 14, 2004 8:32:16 pm by PeterHewett
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