On Wed, Aug 09, 2000, Ira Abramov wrote about "Re: Stupid X Q.":
> On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Y. Benado wrote:
>
> > > What is the difference between X11R6 & XFree86 ?
> > X11R6 is Xfree86 Release 6 AFAIK
>
> ASCII silly question, get a stupid ANSI.
:)
>
> X11R6 is the spec, thre protocols, the APIs.
>
> xfree86 is an xserver project, an implementation of that standard (viva
> standards!) if you have an application written for X11 (on Solaris, BSD,
> Linux, AIX or even windogs) is can connect to any X11 server running on
> another machine (xfree86, Excede, Starnet Xwin32, MI/X, Xinside, MetroX,
> Solaris whatever).
Several people said roughly the same thing, and I beg to differ. X11 was
*not* a standard, spec or protocol per se, it was also complete implementation.
It was an implementation with a complete, open and free, specification.
In 1994, when I got at work a Sun workstation with crappy X11R3 & OpenLook,
I took the X11R4 distribution from MIT's ftp site, compiled it (took almost
half a day to compile), and got myself a fully working X server. The
distribution included the X protocol specification, the Xlib specification,
the ICCCM, the Xt Intrinsics, an example Xt widget set (the Athena widgets)
but also a complete implementation of the server (for several systems) and
many client applications (including xterm, the twm ICCCM-compliant
window-manager, and many other basic applications). When MIT's X team was at
it's peak, makers of commercial Unix (like Sun, Digital, Hp, etc.) licensed
MIT's source, and added their own stuff (mainly straightforward porting to
new graphic systems, but also some new features like Sun's NeWS, Display
Postscript, and so on. An additional Xt-based widget set, Motif, was also
created by third parties, and so was (later) the CDE "standard".)
Anyway, as far as I know, X servers for all Unix-flavors are directly based
on MIT's original source code. Not only that, but when the X Consortium
released X11R6 (after several years of X11R5), the XFree86 team worked hard
at reintegrating the new code into their servers. Windows servers like Excede
may be completely new code, but I'm not even sure of that.
The nice thing about the X Window System is that it's wonderful definition
documents (available with any source distribution of X, by the way) outlasted
the original MIT X project and now continues to act as a standard. About
the same thing is happening to Unix. When was the last time any of you used
an AT&T-released Unix? Pretty soon people will start saying that Unix is
just a standard, and Linux is it's implementation...
As I said, Sic transit gloria mundi...
--
Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Aug 9 2000, 9 Av 5760
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