Leon Shiman, Secretary, X.org is on hand for a number of LinuxWorld programs including the Linux and Open Source and Government Day (the third in the LinuxWorld series) as well as representing X.org in the .org Pavilion.
Why is X.org so important to open source?
X.org is unique among the major open source projects both because of the history of it’s use and the underlying technology that underlies all of the Linux desktop—it’s a layer that’s necessary to have a windowed desktop. The X.org organization is the really the precursor to the community. The people that founded the project still contribute today (nearly 20 years)…and X is neutral--vendor, platform, and OS independent. It runs on everything and is network transparent.
X.org is run, owned and managed by the community. Membership is free and open and members elect the board of directors who are fully responsible for the technology. This was a part of our reorganization two years ago to achieve complete community ownership.
What has been the growth of X?
There are nearly 1000 contributors, the membership list has over 200 members and there have been 5 releases in the last 18 months and two new major innovative releases will come out in the fall.
How about your interest in government issues?
The X windows system has been friendly to close collaboration between proprietary and free architectures which is particularly important in relation to government IT demands. Open standards need to be brought into government at a fundamental level. These interests are also very important on a global basis-Europe, Asia, and developing nations are all intensely interested and the support has been very dramatic.
Most of the major revolution points of innovation in the last 20 years have come from open software-sendmail, perl, apache, HTML etc. These have forced standardization and innovation on proprietary solutions. As an example Google would never have been possible without free software.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 8, 2005 01:17 PM
