X.Org Foundation
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The X.Org Foundation is the organization holding the stewardship for the development of the X Window System. It was founded on 22 January 2004.
The modern X.org Foundation came into being when the body that oversaw X standards and published the official reference implementation joined forces with former XFree86 developers. The creation of the Foundation marked a radical change in the governance of X. Whereas the stewards of X since 1988 (including the previous X.Org) had been vendor organizations, the Foundation is led by software developers and using community development on the bazaar model, which relies on outside involvement. Membership is also open to individuals, with corporate membership being in the form of sponsorship.
The Foundation is a Delaware LLC, with non-profit status as a scientific charity. The current (2005) Board of Directors is Stuart Anderson (Free Standards Group), Egbert Eich (SUSE/Novell), Jim Gettys (OLPC), Stuart Kreitman (Sun Microsystems), Kevin Martin (Red Hat), Jim McQuillan (Linux Terminal Server Project) and Leon Shiman (Shiman Associates and the old X.Org).
The X.Org Server is the reference implementation of X, and is commonly used on Linux and UNIX; it is the fundamental technology underlying both the modern GNOME and KDE desktops and older CDE desktop environment; applications written for any of these environments can be run simultaneously. The current version is X11R7.1. It is hosted at freedesktop.org.
