On the name "XFree86"

Should have covered this in my previous diatribe...

The name of this project is XFree86. Not XFree. Not Xfree. XFree86.

Some history, for those of you too young to remember it...

Way back in days of yore, when X11R4 existed, a gentleman by the name of
Thomas Roell ported X11R4 to the x86/commercial UNIX environment, and
released it as freeware (but not Open Source) under the name 'X386'. And all
was right with the world.

When X11R5 rolled around, Thomas and Mark Snitily of SGCS joined forces to
commercialize X386, joined the X Consortium, and contributed X386 1.2 to
X11R5. They then went on to sell commercial X servers, software, etc (what
happened to that venture is an utterly different story, but XiG evolved from
it).

X386 1.2 was somewhat buggy, and somewhat slow, compared to X386 1.1. David
Dawes and I were working on the buggy part, and Glenn Lai and Jim Tsillas
were working on the slow part. We pulled all this together into a single
patch set that we put out under the name 'X386 1.2E' (for Enhanced), after
consultation with SGCS.

This was a bad idea; SGCS was selling X386 1.3 and kept getting asked for
support on X386 1.2E. So we agreed to change the name.

After a round of discussions, we settled on XFree86 (which I proposed, I'm
proud to say). It's a pun - first there was X386, and it went commercial, so
we called ours XFree86.

BTW - I also suggested the name "FreeX", pronounced as a single word, but
that one lost.

Anyhow, please keep our name "whole". Thanks much.

-- 
David Wexelblat, Chief Architect    mailto:[email protected]
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