X11 is in its twilight years, with most Linux distributions and desktop environments already moving on to Wayland. Still, there\u2019s a fresh attempt to breathe new life into the project. That said, this revival hasn\u2019t come without its share of drama, and right now, it\u2019s being driven by a single developer. Here’s what it’s all about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted<\/a>. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org<\/a>,” Weigelt released a statement saying:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This morning, Redhat employees banned me from the freedesktop.org gitlab infrastructure – so censored all my work (not just on Xorg). They killed my account, my git repos, my tickets in Xorg and closed all my merge requests. And then making fun on social media about it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s now clear that freedesktop.org is the Redskirts, and they want to kill X. By the way, the same corporation that tied to proprietarize a lot of FOSS code, including the Linux kernel (and I’ve been one of those who warned them about terminating our license grants them).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Just to be clear, I didn’t want to fork, I tried my best to work together with the Xorg team. But I knew for long time, this day would come. Xorg has been captured by Redhat, in order to get rid of destroy competition. The necessary consequence is a fork, more competition.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Together we’ll make X great again!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In other words, according to Weigelt, the primary cause behind this action seems to be his decision to fork Xorg into a new project named Xlibre<\/strong>\u2014an initiative aimed at revitalizing X11, an older but foundational windowing system for Linux, and making tangible progress where development had stagnated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interestingly, Weigelt noted a historical parallel\u2014comparing his experience to Keith Packard,<\/a> a respected figure in the FOSS community who faced similar exclusion nearly two decades ago. Packard’s departure eventually led to the creation of Xorg, marking the end of its predecessor, XFree86. Weigelt foresees a comparable trajectory for Xlibre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n