Editing X Window System (section)

===The X.Org Foundation===
In early 2004, various people from X.Org and freedesktop.org formed the [[X.Org Foundation]], and the Open Group gave it control of the <code>x.org</code> [[domain name]]. This marked a radical change in the governance of X. Whereas the stewards of X since 1988 (including the prior X.Org) had been vendor organizations, the Foundation was led by software developers and used community development based on the [[The Cathedral and the Bazaar|bazaar]] model,{{citation needed|date=October 2015}} which relies on outside involvement. Membership was opened to individuals, with corporate membership being in the form of sponsorship. Several major corporations such as [[Hewlett-Packard]] currently{{timeframe|date=February 2024}} support the X.Org Foundation.

The Foundation takes an oversight role over X development: technical decisions are made on their merits by achieving rough consensus among community members. Technical decisions are not made by the board of directors; in this sense, it is strongly modelled on the technically non-interventionist [[GNOME Foundation]]. The Foundation employs no developers.
The Foundation released X11R6.7, the [[X.Org Server]], in April 2004, based on XFree86 4.4RC2 with X11R6.6 changes merged. Gettys and Packard had taken the last version of XFree86 under the old license and, by making a point of an open development model and retaining GPL compatibility, brought many of the old XFree86 developers on board.<ref name="dwheeler.com"/>

While X11 had received extensions such as OpenGL support during the 1990s, its architecture had remained fundamentally unchanged during the decade. In the early part of the 2000s, however, it was overhauled to resolve a number of problems that had surfaced over the years, including a "flawed" [[Computer font|font]] architecture, a 2D graphics system "which had always been intended to be augmented and/or replaced", and [[Latency (engineering)|latency]] issues.<ref>{{cite conference |last1=Gettys |first1=James |first2=Keith |last2=Packard |title=The (Re) Architecture of the X Window System |conference=Proc. Linux Symposium |volume=1 |year=2004 |url=https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch_ols2004.pdf}}</ref>
X11R6.8 came out in September 2004. It added significant new features, including preliminary support for translucent windows and other sophisticated visual effects, screen magnifiers and thumbnailers, and facilities to integrate with 3D immersive display systems such as Sun's [[Project Looking Glass]] and the [[Croquet project]]. External applications called ''[[compositing window manager]]s'' provide policy for the visual appearance.

On 21 December 2005,<ref>[http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/Other/Press/X11R6970Released?action=show&redirect=PressReleases%2FX11R6970Released X11R6.9 and X11R7.0 Officially Released] 21 December 2005</ref> X.Org released X11R6.9, the monolithic [[source code|source]] tree for legacy users, and X11R7.0, the same source code separated into independent modules, each maintainable in separate projects.<ref>[https://www.x.org/wiki/ModularizationProposal/ Modularization Proposal] 31 March 2005</ref> The Foundation released X11R7.1 on 22 May 2006, about four months after 7.0, with considerable feature improvements.<ref>[https://www.x.org/wiki/ChangesForX11R71/ Proposed Changes for X11R7.1] 21 April 2006</ref>

XFree86 development continued for a few more years, 4.8.0 being released on 15 December 2008.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.xfree86.org/releases/rel480.html|title=The Current XFree86 Release: 4.8.0.|work=xfree86.org}}</ref>