XFree86® Project Mission Statement

The Mission Statement consists of three parts.

The first part defines the Project's primary goals. These goals represent the spirit of the Project, and capture its essence and reason for existence. This section may be amplified and expanded, but is essentially unchanged throughout the Project's existence.

The second part defines the Project's formal organisational structure. This part may change as needed to best meet the Project's goals.

The third part defines the Project's daily operational structure. This part may change as needed to meet the Project's goals within the context of resources available.

1. Primary Goal

The primary goal of the XFree86 Project is to produce XFree86® and to make it the best freely-redistributable Open Source implementation of the X Window System by implementing it on as many hardware and software platforms as possible, by enhancing and extending it to meet the needs of new hardware and software platforms and by licensing it in a manner that is the same as or equivalent in spirit to the original MIT/X licence. The Project seeks to work towards this goal in a manner that gives the strongest weight to the technical integrity of the ideas, implementation, and individuals involved, with the commercial viability and influences from commercial or political interests being non-goals and explicitly not addressed.

2. Organisation

The formal legal entity that is The XFree86 Project, Inc. is charged with providing the infrastructure required for achieving the Project's goals, which includes:

Being a nonprofit organisation able to accept donations to help fund the necessary infrastructure.
Providing a corporate entity that can join other organisations for the benefit of the Project's goals.
Holding and protecting the XFree86® trademark.
Protecting the Project against undue influence from other organisations.
Licensing technology (including patents and trademarks) from other organisations under public use and redistribution conditions consistent with the Project's goals, only when this is of benefit to the Project's goals.
Setting the policies by which the Project operates and ensuring that those policies are consistent with the Project's goals.

The XFree86 Project has a group of active developers that is charged with maintaining the technical integrity of the Project and ensuring that the technical direction of the XFree86 is consistent with the Project's goals, which includes:

Protecting, preserving, promoting and extending code stability, quality, design and architectural direction.
Resolving conflicts that may arise between different technical solutions to the same problem.
Overseeing the CVS source repository, and enforcing relevant policies so that it remains consistent with the Project's goals.

3. Operation

Volunteer individuals who support the Project's primary goals determine the Project's operation, and the technical direction is determined by those contributors whose concrete ideas and proposals are backed up with implementations or the resources to implement them, also in consideration of the Project's primary goals.

The Project currently provides the following:

A public mailing list (devel@XFree86.org) open to all for the discussion of all technical and development issues related to XFree86. This is the forum that should be used for everyone interested in the technical aspects of XFree86 and for everyone interested in contributing to the future direction of XFree86.
A public mailing list (XFree86@XFree86.org) open to all for the discussion of bugs, problems and user-support issues related to XFree86. This provides a forum for those using XFree86 to seek help from the XFree86 community at large.
A public mailing list (forum@XFree86.org) open to all for high level discussions about XFree86 and related technology. This provides a forum for open communication between all groups interested in XFree86.
A publicly readable CVS repository that allows everyone to follow and track the XFree86 source tree and its development. This is accompanied by a publicly readable mailing list that receives all commit messages for that repository.
A publicly accessible bug tracking system that should be used to submit bug reports, bug fixes, feature requests, and code implementing new features.
Regularly tagged snapshots from the main development trunk of the CVS repository. These tags happen automatically, and are intended to provide regular checkpoints rather than self-consistent or stable versions of XFree86. The Project doesn't currently have the resources to produce frequent stable releases of XFree86, or to maintain stable branches of XFree86. Parties interested in seeing regular official stable releases of XFree86 may consider sponsoring them. Others may form their own stable "releases" from the code publicly available from here and elsewhere in such a manner that they cannot be confused with official XFree86® releases.

The XFree86 Project encourages everyone to do their work and make their contributions to the development of XFree86 in the manner that they find most comfortable and productive, and using our public mailing lists ensures seamless integration and full participation of the XFree86 development community.

XFree86® is a registered trademark of The XFree86 Project, Inc.

Last modified: 9 June 2004