A Political History of X

Explore the 35-year political history of the X Window System in this 46-minute conference talk by Keith Packard at LCA 2020. Delve into the origins of X, its interactions with major Unix workstation vendors, and early connections with the Free Software Foundation. Examine how internet performance issues in the mid-80s influenced X's structure and governance, impacting the broader software ecosystem. Analyze the effects of software licensing choices on community structure and corporate engagement. Gain insights into the evolution of free software through the lens of one of its oldest surviving projects, from pre-GPL times to the present day.

Intro
Unix in 1984
The Origins of X
VAXstation 100 (aka vs 100)
Unix Workstation Market
VAXstation 11
Sun 3/60
X10
Why X11?
X as Corporate Tool
MIT X Consortium
Where Was The GPL?
X Consortium Standards
DECstation 3100
Software Framebuffer Code
The Free Unix Desktop
The X Toolkit (xt)
X Stagnates
Collapse of Unix