### About the X.Org Foundation.
X.Org
Foundation's (or X.Org for
short) purpose is to research, develop, support, organize, administrate,
standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics
stack and the developers and users thereof. This stack includes, but is
not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa, Wayland and the X
Window System.
The X.Org Foundation has an open membership, and a Board of Directors which is
elected from the membership. Please check the
[Board Of Directors](../BoardOfDirectors) page for information about the Board.
Information on how to join the X.Org Foundation can be found on the
[Membership](../Membership) page.
### Why X.Org Foundation?
In a period between close to the end of 2003 and beginning of 2004, there were
attempts from leading XFree86.org project members to apply a few restrictions on
the existing 1.0 license of the upcoming XFree86 X4.4.0 release. Since not all
(developers, distributors, hardware vendors) were able or willing to agree with
and implement that new licensing policy in their code, their development process
and their products, they consequently split up and rejoined in the form of the
X.Org Foundation.
As a base for their future works, they took one of the last code snippets
covered by the old license and joined that with the still existing and freely
available codebase from X.Org. Further taking responsibility for the contents
of the x.org domain made them the de-facto successor of the
[X Consortium](../XConsortium). With their accumulated development power and
their joint efforts, there were two major releases and a patch-level release
in 2004, a second patch-level release in early 2005, and major releases each
year since. A current summary of the state of the foundation can be found in
the most recent [Annual Report](../XorgFoundation/Reports/).
Details on any major X Window System Release can be located through the
[Releases](../XorgReleases) page. The Foundation provides [funding](../XorgFunding)
for various kinds of activities that advance X.Org, most notably
[student development](../XorgEVoC) and [workshops and meetings](../XorgWorkshops).
Traditional contracting for X Window System development is explicitly not
funded by the Foundation, among whose purposes is to encourage development by
volunteers.
