About the X.Org Foundation.
X.Org Foundation (or X.Org for short) is a company recently organized to operate as a scientific charity under IRS code 501(c)(3), chartered to develop and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship of the X Window System technology and standards. The X.Org Foundation has an open membership, and a Board of Directors which is elected from the membership. Please check the BoardOfDirectors page for information about the Board.
The website for the X.Org Foundation and information on how to join it can be found at http://www.x.org/.
Mailing Address
X.Org Foundation P.O. Box 80022 Portland, OR 97280 USA
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 in the x.org domain made them the de-facto successor of XConsortium. With their accumulated development power and their joint efforts, there were already two major releases and a patch-level release in 2004, a second patch-level release in early 2005, and major releases in 2005, 2006, and 2007.
Details on any major X Windows Release can be located through the Releases page. For details on former and current XFree86 licensing models and the expressed opinions of current XFree86 heads for the change, please see here.