### About the X.Org Foundation. X.Org Foundation (or X.Org for short) is a company chartered to develop and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship and encouragement of the X Window System and related projects (Mesa, DRI, Wayland, etc.). The X.Org Foundation has an open membership, and a Board of Directors which is elected from the membership. Please check the [[BoardOfDirectors|BoardOfDirectors]] page for information about the Board. Information on how to join the X.Org Foundation can be found on the [[Membership|Membership]] page. ### Why X.Org Foundation? In a period between close to the end of 2003 and beginning of 2004, there were attempts from leading XFree86.org project members to apply a few restrictions on the existing 1.0 license of the upcoming XFree86 X4.4.0 release. Since not all (developers, distributors, hardware vendors) were able or willing to agree with and implement that new licensing policy in their code, their development process and their products, they consequently split up and rejoined in the form of the X.org Foundation. As a base for their future works, they took one of the last code snippets covered by the old license and joined that with the still existing and freely available codebase from X.org. Further taking responsibility for the contents in the x.org domain made them the de-facto successor of [[XConsortium|XConsortium]]. With their accumulated development power and their joint efforts, there were already two major releases and a patch-level release in 2004, a second patch-level release in early 2005, and major releases each year since. A current summary of the state of the foundation can be found in the most recent [[Annual Report|XorgFoundation/Reports/]]. Details on any major X Windows Release can be located through the [[Releases|XorgReleases]] page. The Foundation provides [[funding|XorgFunding]] for various kinds of activities that advance X.Org, most notably [[student development|XorgEVoC]] and [[workshops and meetings|XorgWorkshops]]. Traditional contracting for X Window System development is explicitly not funded by the Foundation, among whose purposes is to encourage development by volunteers.