The price of software freedom is eternal politics • The Register

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 Wayback a “display server” because it attempts to use a Wayland compositor to replace an X11 server, making it possible to run existing X11 desktops and window managers under XWayland, without any other X11 server – thus supporting traditional X11 desktop environments. In a follow-up blog post entitled “Two weeks of wayback,” developer Ariadne Conill shows screenshots of it running Window Maker, a NeXT-style window manager one distro of which we looked at in 2023. (Since then, there’s been a significantly updated new version.) She also describes her motivations:

This comment highlights one of the key differences between the projects.

Xlibre is both a conservative, and Conservative, fork. Technologically small-c conservative, inasmuch as its proponents don’t want Wayland and prefer the existing, well-established X11 tools, but also capital-C Conservative. Its GitHub README states that it is “explicitly free of any ‘DEI’ or similar discriminatory policies” and intentionally has an empty Code of Conduct file. Weigelt is understood to align himself with extremely right-wing politics.

And yet none of this seems to have reduced interest in the project. At the time of writing, it has 3,100 stars on GitHub, 157 forks, and 78 watchers. Its Telegram channel has 713 members. The Devuan project has posted about its support on Twitter X. There’s already a package in the AUR for Arch Linux, and the systemd-free Arch distro also tweeted about Xlibre. Artix already has testing ISO files with Xlibre available.

Igor Ljubuncic writes FOSS blog Dedoimedo, and last month posted “Long live X.org, I mean Xlibre!” The Reg FOSS desk met Igor when he worked for Canonical, and he talked to us about Snap. His views about the performance and resource utilization of Wayland versus X.org are based on extensive testing and performance benchmarks as well as power usage figures, both tested on Nvidia hardware as well as AMD hardware.

The same person who posted about and criticized Weigelt’s politics in a later post described some meticulously reasoned Wayland criticism with the phrase “wayland-is-a-conspiracy nuts,” which strikes us as extreme and unfair.

But strong reactions in this space go with the territory. These are big ideas, which inspire strong feelings. This vulture has found this out from personal experience. Merely suggesting the use of FOSS in business can face harsh opposition. This writer once had a section written into his employment contract at a pure-Microsoft vendor, explicitly forbidding him from ever mentioning free software to any of the company’s clients.

Bill Gates got his 1974 wish: “A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.” That means there are thousands of people who’ve built entire multi-decade careers around their knowledge of Microsoft products – and no other software. When someone comes along and tells them that they can rip out an entire organization’s expensive software and replace it with free stuff that they don’t know at all, it is only human nature to be resistant to this notion, and even flatly disbelieve it. As author and activist Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Where people encounter money and influence, you will find politics. FOSS itself is inherently political. One big problem is that the catch-all term “FOSS” tries to bring two quite different communities with mutually opposing views together under one banner. FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software, but Free Software and Open Source are not the same things. They are opposites, different sides of the same coin.

Free Software is an expressly left-wing sort of proposition that was formalized in the 1980s. It uses the ambiguous word “free” as in “freedom.” It is all about personal liberty, about giving people the right to take someone else’s creations, change them however they see fit, and do whatever they want with them, including re-sharing them.

In contrast, Open Source came along over a decade later and is a very much a right-wing capitalist sort of idea – that anyone, including companies, can make better software by developing it in the open. A significant inspiration was the 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by writer, hacker, and activist Eric S Raymond, and for an idea of his views, note that his personal page advocates for the Libertarian Party, and also his position on firearms control.

The Open Source movement is relatively corporate, and seeks to persuade businesses that developing in the open makes for better software, which, indirectly, makes them more money. The Free Software movement is about ensuring users’ rights, including access to the source code, and founder Richard Stallman explicitly says that “Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software.”

The term “FOSS” tries to cover both “FS” and “OS”, but mingling the two very different terms together risks its advocates forgetting that this handy catch-all acronym masks a profound and important difference of opinion.

Which leaves us where?

In the middle of 2025, we have Xlibre, a fork of the X.org X11 server, which was forked from XFree86 in 2004. (It’s long dormant but XFree86 still exists.) Xlibre’s project lead is someone who is explicitly alt-right.

On the one hand, this is freaking out the left-wing types, many of whom seem to have forgotten that there is a right-wing side to FOSS. There is shock and horror. One blog post went so far as to say that the Xlibre case brings out the worst in the open source community.

On the other hand, though, the right-wing FOSS folks are flocking to it. As we said above, the project has lots of followers. GitHub lists 512 contributors to the code. Xlibre is starting to win distro support, just as other distros explicitly disavow it.

To legitimize something, the next best thing to supporting it is to oppose it. Now Xlibre has an opponent. The Wayback project was only announced a couple of weeks ago. When we wrote about it a few days later, developer Ariadne Conill told us that “the timeline got moved up a bit – I was originally aiming for next year for this – as a result of their announcement.” On Monday, she published a blog post about two weeks of Wayback. But it too is winning supporters and endorsement. Since the blog post, Wayback has changed its Git hosting – it’s now an official Freedesktop project. It has even got a shiny new logo to match the X.org Foundation logo.

Despite this new and as yet unproven opponent, Wayland is thriving. A month ago, we reported that both Fedora and Ubuntu would drop the GNOME X11 session.

We have often seen claims to the effect that “the people who wrote Wayland were the same people that developed X.org.” That’s not really true. X.org start out as a fork of XFree86. XFree86 is older than Linux itself. It started out as a fork of Thomas Roell’s X386, which was sold commercially. In turn, X386 started out as a fork of MIT’s X11R4, released in 1989, where it came out of MIT’s Project Athena, a distributed computing effort the university started in 1983.

No single company owns or controls X11 – and nobody ever did. It’s an open standard. After MIT, lots of other companies developed and sold X11 servers. In the above article about disappearing GNOME X11 support, we listed over 20 different X11 servers that either exist today or were actively sold in the past. Wikipedia lists about a dozen more. It just so happened that, like Unix itself, once a good-enough Free Software implementation was available, everyone else pretty much stopped trying.

The good folks at Freedesktop.org didn’t write X.org, they inherited it. Today, the main sponsor of most Linux development, and especially the sponsors of the maintenance of a huge amount of existing code, is the giant of the Linux world, Red Hat, which has been a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM since Big Blue bought it in 2018. This is the same company whose former employee wrote systemd, everyone’s favorite init system.

As The Register wrote over a decade ago, IBM was “first incorporated back in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company.”

There are several rich ironies in the current situation around X11 and Wayland. X11 is now the staid, boring, old tech. A year ago, we celebrated its 40th anniversary. As that article pointed out, the nascent X Window System inherited a lot of the design and code of its forerunner, the W Window System. It was named because X follows W in the alphabet.

Now Wayland is the hip new alternative. The new Wayback logo replaces the X.org logo with W, just as 42 years earlier, X replaced W. And this more modern choice, the one that the diverse and inclusive left-wing faction in the debate favors, doesn’t support this grumpy old hack’s favorite desktop. Nor does it support vast majority of the 21 different desktops we listed while bemoaning Linux desktop diversity in 2022. It’s all about freedom of choice, as long as you choose GNOME, KDE, Cosmic, or a tiling window manager.

(Which is why we were delighted to learn about Wayback, and we really want to see it succeed.)

Wayland, this brave, less legacy-encumbered choice of a new generation, is mainly sponsored by the biggest, oldest, richest, most establishment company of any and every organization in software. ®