About the X.Org Foundation.

X.Org Foundation's (or X.Org for short) purpose is to research, develop, support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics stack and the developers and users thereof. This stack includes, but is not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa, Wayland and the X Window System.

The X.Org Foundation has an open membership, and a Board of Directors which is elected from the membership. Please check the Board Of Directors page for information about the Board. Information on how to join the X.Org Foundation can be found on the Membership page.

Why X.Org Foundation?

In a period between close to the end of 2003 and beginning of 2004, there were attempts from leading XFree86.org project members to apply a few restrictions on the existing 1.0 license of the upcoming XFree86 X4.4.0 release. Since not all (developers, distributors, hardware vendors) were able or willing to agree with and implement that new licensing policy in their code, their development process and their products, they consequently split up and rejoined in the form of the X.Org Foundation.

As a base for their future works, they took one of the last code snippets covered by the old license and joined that with the still existing and freely available codebase from X.Org. Further taking responsibility for the contents of the x.org domain made them the de-facto successor of the X Consortium. With their accumulated development power and their joint efforts, there were two major releases and a patch-level release in 2004, a second patch-level release in early 2005, and major releases each year since. A current summary of the state of the foundation can be found in the most recent Annual Report.

Details on any major X Window System Release can be located through the Releases page. The Foundation provides ?funding for various kinds of activities that advance X.Org, most notably student development and workshops and meetings. Traditional contracting for X Window System development is explicitly not funded by the Foundation, among whose purposes is to encourage development by volunteers.

The X.Org Foundation welcomes sponsorship (both cash and in-kind), and tries hard to put the donations of sponsors to transparent good use. The Foundation is an extremely low-overhead all-volunteer organization. If you are interested in contributing, please see our SponsorshipPage.

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Make your check payable to Software in the Public Interest, Inc. and write "X.org" in the memo or reference field. For more information including the mailing address, please see https://spi-inc.org/donations/