Open-Source Initiative X11Libre Launches: A Community-Driven Fork of X.Org Server Free from Corporate Influence

An open project called X11Libre has been launched, which is a fork of the X.org Server aimed at cleaning up the codebase and continuing the active development of X.org’s functionalities.

According to OpenNET, the initiative was spearheaded by Enrico Weigelt, a maintainer of AMD FCH GPIO and VIRTIO GPIO drivers in the Linux kernel, as well as an active developer of Xorg with 1,831 commits over the past two years and a maintainer of Xnest.

In the project announcement, Weigelt noted that the freedesktop.org project lacks independence and is controlled by Red Hat, which he believes is deliberately stalling the development of the X server and attempting to bury the X11 project. It is worth mentioning that Weigelt has faced criticism from Linus Torvalds for his tendency to indulge in conspiracy theories.

Following the creation of the fork and efforts to draw attention to the revival of the X server, Karol Herbst, an employee at Red Hat and an advocate for inclusivity in the community, blocked Weigelt’s access to the freedesktop.org GitLab infrastructure, removed his repositories, and closed over 140 submitted merge requests, which had raised concerns about the quality of the changes. In response, Weigelt invited anyone interested to join the development of X11Libre on GitHub, asserting that there is community interest in continuing the development of X.org. He noted that a considerable number of unaccepted changes and improvements had accumulated during the period of artificial restraint on X.org’s development.

The first release of X11Libre is expected to be published in the coming days. The project aims to remain completely independent and free from any corporate or activist influences, avoiding discriminatory policies such as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Anyone who is kind to others and interested in promoting X11 is welcome to participate.

Among the updates planned for the upcoming release of X11Libre are:

— Support for the X11 extension Xnamespace, which provides client isolation through namespace segmentation.
— Transitioning Xnest to XCB and removing Xlib as a dependency.
— The capability to install different ABI versions simultaneously for seamless updates in distributions.
— Ongoing work aimed at eliminating technical debt in the codebase.

Community feedback indicated that Weigelt had submitted poorly tested changes in the past that, for instance, caused issues with xrandr and led to system freezes. Other developers expressed dissatisfaction with Weigelt’s code cleanup efforts, as they resulted in constant ABI changes in the master branch of X.org and caused compilation failures. Ultimately, it was suggested to halt the acceptance of changes from Enrico, as his code cleanup activities did not address specific bugs or resolve existing issues but rather created new problems.