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

linux.conf.au

32K subscribers • 14 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 6 people: 4 on Hacker News and 2 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
  • Presented by Keith Packard, X Window System developer

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

52K views6 years ago6 recommendations

History and cultureSystems programmingHistory of computingOpen sourceLinux

Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System, exploring how licensing, corporate interests, and community dynamics shaped free software.

Keith Packard lca2020.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/186/ Stretching back over 35 years, the X Window System is one of the oldest surviving free software projects. Having its origins before the invention of the GPL, the history of X offers a slice through the whole lifetime of the software freedom movement. Using X as a lens, we can study the causes and effects of licensing, community and corporations in the world of free software. This presentation will describe the origins of X, a discussion about the influences and interactions with the major Unix workstation vendors and early interactions with the Free Software Foundation. Also included will be a description of how internet performance bottlenecks in the mid 80s drove structural and governance changes in X that haunt the larger software ecosystem to the current day. Finally, a discussion on how software licensing choices drive community structure and affect corporate engagement will be included. linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see linux.conf.au/ Produced by NDV: youtube.com/channel/UCQ7dFBzZGlBvtU2hCecsBBg?sub_confirmatio… #linux.conf.au #linux #foss #opensource Thu Jan 16 2020 at Room 8

Why it's here

6 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating historical account of the development, licensing struggles, and governance of the X Window System.

jraphon Hacker News • Recommends

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 - link to this video (can be listened without the video if you want to do other things while listening to it)
View on Hacker News

andycon Lobsters • Recommends

"A Political History of X" - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
9View on Lobsters

inactive-useron Lobsters • Recommends

A Political History of X
8View on Lobsters

pjmlpon Hacker News • Recommends

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) link to this video
View on Hacker News

throw0101con Hacker News • Recommends

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): * link to 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.
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indroraon Hacker News • Recommends

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: link to this video )
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sprashon Hacker News • Mentions

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.: link to this video
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Beltalowdaon Hacker News • Mentions

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: link to this video
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ch_123on Hacker News • Mentions

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 link to this video 2 link
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arp242on Hacker News • Mentions

On “RFC: PHP license update”

…rstand 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 link to 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 offices and ask us, or…
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