David Dawes is one of the founders of the XFree86

XFree86

XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and is now available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the XFree86 License version 1.1. It is developed by the...

 project. He was one of four people who started it in 1992 (together with David Wexelblat, Glenn Lai, and Jim Tsillas), and became the project president in 1994.

The XFree86 Project used the MIT/X11 license

MIT License

The MIT License is a free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software provided all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms...

 until 2004, when Dawes, as the XFree86 president, decided to license XFree86 4.4 under the newly devised XFree86 License 1.1. The new license includes a "credit clause" similar to the old BSD License advertising clause. The Free Software Foundation

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...

 determined that the new license, which was protested by free software leaders such as Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...

 and Theo de Raadt

Theo de Raadt

Theo de Raadt , born May 19, 1968 in Pretoria, South Africa, is a software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, and was a founding member of the NetBSD project.- Childhood :...

 was incompatible with the version 2 of GNU GPL.

While Dawes explained this as an attempt to make sure the XFree86 developers get their due credit (apparently in response to the Xouvert fork), the decision was contested in the XFree86 community, notably by Jim Gettys

Jim Gettys

Jim Gettys is an American computer programmer at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, USA. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Software at the One Laptop per Child project, working on the software for the OLPC XO-1. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked on...

 and Keith Packard

Keith Packard

Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System.Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X...

, and the dissenters subsequently forked the project into the X.Org Server

X.Org Server

X.Org Server refers to the X server release packages stewarded by the X.Org Foundation,which is hosted by freedesktop.org, and grants...

. The fork superseded XFree86, as other projects found the new license unacceptable.

Dawes still heads the XFree86 Project and maintains XFree86 without corporate sponsorships; however, the last release of the software was in 2008. Dawes also runs his own small private company called X-Oz Technologies, which provides project management and consulting services.

External links

• Home page
• Page discussing the effects of XFree86 license changes
• The means to an X for Linux: an interview with David Dawes from XFree86.org (Matthew Arnison, CAT TV, June 1999)
• X-Oz Technologies