4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2020–2025score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters recommend it as the authoritative, firsthand account of how X came to be and why it isn't GPL.
Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System at linux.conf.au 2020. He uses X to examine licensing, corporate interests and community dynamics in free software, including Unix workstation vendors and Stallman's influence.
“I invite anyone interested by the subject to watch Keith Packard's amazing presentation on this at LCA 2020” (HN, 2022)
I invite anyone interested by the subject to watch Keith Packard's amazing presentation on this at LCA 2020: A Political History of X - [this video] (can be listened without the video if you want to do other things while listening to it)
> X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a distributed graphical display server. An overview of how this came to be: "A Political History of X" - Keith Packard (LCA 2020) [this video]
Perhaps of some interest is "A Political History of X" by Keith Packard from the 2020 Linux Conference Australia (LCA): * [this video] > Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation. * [link] Goes over things from the early 1980s.
X11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly conjoined at the spinal cord". An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace. (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: [this video] )
> It's a development model that worked reasonably well for the X protocol. The development of early X11 didn't work very well at all. Even Keith Packard himself says so [1]. 1.: [this video]
On the other hand, X would have been GPL and not MIT if Stallman hadn't been ranting to the X developers at MIT in the 80s and generally leaving a bad impression. See: [this video]
X originally was created on/ran on a graphics terminal - the DEC VAXstation 100. The VS100 was quite different to the later X thin client terminals: it required an adapter card to be installed in a host system, and the software which ran on the VS100 could directly access a chunk of shared memory on the host. Ports to workstations with inbuilt graphics hardware came later. References: [1] [this video] [2] [link]
> I also do not understand why anyone would drop the GPL because Stallman does not like their licensing. Because he can be so obnoxious that people want to sever all ties with him and anything that has to do with him so that they never ever have to talk to him ever again in any capacity. This goes back a long time. For example Keith Packard on why X11 isn't GPL (from [this video] ): > Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL and quite an interesting individual lived at 5405 DEC square, he lived up on the sixth floor I think? Had an office up there; he did not have an apartment. And we knew him extremely well. He was a challenging individual to get along with. He would regularly come down to our offices and ask us, or kind of rail at us, for not using the GPL. > This did not make a positive impression on me; this was my first interaction with Richard directly and I remember thinking at the time, “this guy is a little, you know, I’m not interesting in talking to him because he’s so challenging to work with.” > And so, we should have listened to him then but we did not because, we know him too well, I guess, and met him as well. There are many anecdotes like this over the years from many people, often people who in broad lines actually agree with Stallman.
Packard's account of Stallman and why X11 is not GPL
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
8 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more