David Dawes

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David Dawes (3 December 1964 - ) is one of the founders of the XFree86 project. He was one of four people who started it in 1992 (together with David Wexelblat, Glenn Lai, and Jim Tsillas), and became the project president in 1994.

The XFree86 Project used the MIT/X open source license, before Dawes as the XFree86 president decided to change the XFree86 license[1]. The new license included an advertising clause and was therefore not compatible with the GNU GPL, which was protested by the GPL advocates such as Richard Stallman; however, it also drew protests from Theo de Raadt, Frédéric Lepied and others. While Dawes explained this as an attempt to make sure the XFree86 developers get their due credit (apparently in response to the Xouvert fork), the decision was contested in the XFree86 community, notably by Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, and the dissenters subsequently forked the project into the X.Org Server.

David still heads XFree86 and continues to be geared to keeping XFree86 not only free and available for volunteers without corporate sponsorships (vs X.org which is a corporate sponsored consortium). And he runs his own small private company called X-Oz Technologies, a pun of David previously being from Oz (Australia) and his lifelong devotion to XFree86.

X-Oz Technologies is dedicated to open source work for XFree86 and its allied technologies and one of its main initiativies is to make a user-level configurable X desktop which could be dynamically changed over the network.