XFree86 Announces Formation of the XFree86 Project, Inc.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, January 24, 1994—The developers of XFree86, a free-software package developed and distributed via the world-wide Internet, announce the formation of The XFree86 Project, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation. Also announced was the filing by the new corporation for membership in X Consortium, Inc.

“This is an exciting day for all of us,” said David E. Wexelblat, President of the XFree86 Project, Inc. “When we started this free software project two years ago, we never imagined that it would grow to this point. Our establishing this corporation and joining X Consortium, Inc., helps give a voice to the entire free software field, in a fast-growing area of largely-commercial software development.”

XFree86 is a package of enhancements to the X Window System, Version 11, Release 5 (X11R5), for use on Intel[r]-based personal computers running Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The X Window System is a vendor-neutral, system-architecture neutral, network-transparent windowing and user interface standard developed by the X Consortium, Inc. XFree86 was initiated in April, 1992, by David Wexelblat, David Dawes, Glenn Lai and Jim Tsillas, to enhance the performance and reliability of X11R5 on the Unix-based personal computers they were using at the time.

Since that time, there have been four major releases of XFree86. The development team has grown to well over 100 developers and testers, and the user community numbers in the 10's or 100's of thousands. XFree86 is the sole implementation for several free- software operating systems (such as Linux, Free BSD, and NetBSD) currently gaining world-wide popularity. XFree86 is also shipped by several commercial operating system vendors in place of, or alongside of, a commercial implementation of The X Window System.

“...there is a choice,” says Evan Leibovitch of Sound Software Ltd., “of either utilizing the X server offered with each Unix (sometimes as an option), or springing for the high-performance third-party servers for a little extra cash (except, of course, for XFree86, which is certainly ready to take its place with Kermit, TeX, gcc, Cnews, Linux and GNU Emacs as one of the most significant freeware products of all time).”

XFree86 supports over a dozen operating systems on Intel-based hardware, including SVR4, UnixWare, SVR3.2, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mach, and OSF/1. More than 20 common SuperVGA chipsets are supported as well as 6 of the most common video accelerator chipsets including those from S3 and ATI. XFree86 is available free of charge from free software repositories around the world, via the world-wide Internet.

For more information about The XFree86 Project, Inc., or XFree86 itself, contact David E. Wexelblat, President, at AIB Software Corporation, 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160, Dulles, VA 20166, 703-430-9247; Fax 703-450-4560.