X11 is a windowing system for UN*X like operating systems. The X
Windowing System was issued by the MIT Consortium (look at the X
manpage for more information) and is put under a very liberal copyright,
that allows any use of source code provided that the original copyright
notices are included. The release of X11 that XFree86 2.* is based
upon is X11 Release 5. The work of the MIT Consortium is continued by
the X Consortium that just released a new release of X, X11R6.
The next official XFree86 release will be based on X11R6 [cf
Appendix
The Future of XFree86
].
As X is the standard windowing system for UN*X operating systems, there
are a lot of applications using it (both free and commercial).
XFree86 2.* is a port of X11R5 that supports several versions of Intel-based Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The XFree86 servers are partly derived from X386 1.2, which was the X server distributed with X11R5, but many of them are newly developed. The accelerated servers that are the most important change since XFree86 1.3 are completely new. This release consists of many new features and performance improvements as well as many bug fixes. The release is available as source patches against the MIT X11R5 code, as well as binary distributions for many architectures.
Note that while the source and installation trees retain the name 'X386' name (for simplicity of maintenance of the source tree), there is no connection between XFree86 and the commercial X386 product sold by SGCS. The XFree86 Project maintains technical contacts in an effort to keep user-affecting changes to the workings of the products from diverging too radically. There is no direct involvement of either group in the workings of the other.
The XFree86 team had several problems in the past due to the fact that it was no legal organisation. So it was not possible to become a member of the X Consortium, Inc. This was sometimes annoying as the new releases are only provided for members before the official release date. This and several other thoughts led to the foundation of The XFree86 Project, Inc.
XFree86 is now a trademark of The XFree86 Project, Inc.
For more information read the section on
The XFree86 Project in the file /usr/X386/lib/X11/etc/README
from the documentation tarfile.
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