"A Political History of X" - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)

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Strong rec jraph · 2022-01 · on “Window System X (1984)”

I invite anyone interested by the subject to watch Keith Packard's amazing presentation on this at LCA 2020: A Political History of X - [this video] (can be listened without the video if you want to do other things while listening to it)

Recommends pjmlp · 2020-03 · on “The X-Windows Disaster (1994)”

> X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a distributed graphical display server. An overview of how this came to be: "A Political History of X" - Keith Packard (LCA 2020) [this video]

Recommends throw0101c · 2023-11 · on “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Plans for Wayland and Xorg Server”

Perhaps of some interest is "A Political History of X" by Keith Packard from the 2020 Linux Conference Australia (LCA): * [this video] > Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation. * [LINK] Goes over things from the early 1980s.

Recommends indrora · 2024-08 · on “Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI”

X11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly conjoined at the spinal cord". An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace. (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: [this video] )

Cites sprash · 2020-01 · on “The sad state of screen sharing on desktop Linux”

> It's a development model that worked reasonably well for the X protocol. The development of early X11 didn't work very well at all. Even Keith Packard himself says so [1]. 1.: [this video]

Cites Beltalowda · 2022-04 · on “Ask HN: Do you believe in GNU's Free Software?”

On the other hand, X would have been GPL and not MIT if Stallman hadn't been ranting to the X developers at MIT in the 80s and generally leaving a bad impression. See: [this video]

Cites ch_123 · 2025-06 · on “The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals”

X originally was created on/ran on a graphics terminal - the DEC VAXstation 100. The VS100 was quite different to the later X thin client terminals: it required an adapter card to be installed in a host system, and the software which ran on the VS100 could directly access a chunk of shared memory on the host. Ports to workstations with inbuilt graphics hardware came later. References: [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]

Cites arp242 · 2025-07 · on “RFC: PHP license update”

> I also do not understand why anyone would drop the GPL because Stallman does not like their licensing. Because he can be so obnoxious that people want to sever all ties with him and anything that has to do with him so that they never ever have to talk to him ever again in any capacity. This goes back a long time. For example Keith Packard on why X11 isn't GPL (from [this video] ): > Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL and quite an interesting individual lived at 5405 DEC square, he lived up on the sixth floor I think? Had an office up there; he did not have an apartment. And we knew him extremely well. He was a challenging individual to get along with. He would regularly come down to our of