The price of software freedom is eternal politics

Comment The new fork of the X.org X11 server is conservative… and we don't mean just technologically conservative.

As The Register has covered at some length in recent months, there is a new fork of X.org's display server. Called Xlibre, it was started by German developer Enrico Weigelt. We had previously covered some of his contributions to X.org in 2024, but even before then he was already a controversial figure.

Unsurprisingly, as Weigelt alleges that Red Hat and its developers are actively suppressing development of the X.org server, because Red Hat supposedly favors Wayland, Fedora elected not to include Xlibre. That wasn't a big surprise; we found it more surprising that someone proposed it in the first place.

As an indirect result, one of the main developers of the Alpine Linux project brought the release of the Wayback display server forward. We call ...