XFree86

» see xfree86.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

If you ran Linux at any point between about 1994 and 2004, XFree86 is what drew your screen. It was the display server, the piece underneath the window manager that talked to the video card and the mouse, and for most of that period it shipped its own drivers for every card a person might plausibly own. The name is a pun. It started in 1992 when David Wexelblat, Glenn Lai, David Dawes and Jim Tsillas began fixing bugs in Thomas Roell's X386 server, and when Roell's commercial version created confusion they renamed theirs to be read as X-free-eighty-six.

Official X development had gone quiet by the late 1990s. The X Consortium existed on paper and produced very little, while nearly all real work was happening inside XFree86, which meant a volunteer project became the effective steward of one of the most widely deployed pieces of infrastructure in computing. In 1999 several hardware vendors sponsored XFree86 into X.Org as an honorary member, which recognized what everyone already knew.

I met it as a configuration file. Anyone who put Linux on a machine at a Turkish university in the early 2000s learned the shape of /etc/X11/XF86Config, because getting a picture out of the card was not automatic and the modeline numbers in that file were something you edited by hand while being told, usually wrongly, that a bad value could damage the monitor. Getting to a graphical login was an event. That whole ritual belonged to XFree86, and it disappeared with it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

The technical death and the social death happened in the wrong order. XFree86 ran a Core Team, a small group with the only commit rights, chosen by existing members. Everyone else sent patches and waited. Distributions maintained enormous local patch sets because getting changes upstream was slow, and by 2002 the resentment inside the project was open.

The break came over Keith Packard. Hours before the feature freeze for version 4.3.0 he committed the XFIXES extension, which he had written himself, without prior review. The Core Team took away his commit access and six weeks later backed the extension out. In March 2003 they accused him of trying to fork the project from inside and expelled him, producing emails as evidence. He set up xwin.org almost immediately, and the developers who were still active drifted over to what was being assembled at freedesktop.org. On 30 December 2003 the Core Team voted to disband itself, having run out of members.

~ the day it died ~

Version 4.4.0 shipped on 29 February 2004 with a modified license. The change was small: an added credit clause modeled on the old BSD advertising requirement, but written more broadly. The Free Software Foundation declared it incompatible with version 2 of the GPL. The XFree86 Project insisted the license was as compatible as any of its previous ones and declined to say which GPL version it meant.

That was the whole event. Within weeks the list of distributions refusing to ship 4.4.0 was long enough for Slashdot to run a story about it growing. OpenBSD 3.5 and Debian Sarge shipped 4.4 RC2 instead, the last build under the old terms, and the X.Org Server was forked from that same release candidate. Almost every remaining XFree86 developer moved with it. A project that had survived a decade of hardware churn and an internal civil war was finished by a paragraph its own maintainers thought was harmless.

~ the inheritance ~

XFree86 kept releasing into an emptying room. Version 4.8.0 came out on 15 December 2008 and the last CVS commit was made on 18 May 2009. In December 2011 a post on the project forum confirmed there would be no more versions. The website was updated one final time in 2014 to note the project's twenty-second birthday and to promise new developments.

NetBSD was the last holdout, shipping XFree86 by default on some architectures until the sources were removed as obsolete in July 2015, with the last traces gone by NetBSD 8.0 in 2018. Everything the project built is still running, because X.Org was a fork rather than a rewrite, and the code that put your desktop on the screen in 1998 is still in there under a different name and a different license. The one thing that did not survive the transfer was the project's own name.

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