David Dawes (3 December 1964 - ) is one of the founders of the XFree86 project. He was one of four people who started it in 1992 (together with David Wexelblat, Glenn Lai, and Jim Tsillas), and became the project president in 1994. XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ...

The XFree86 Project used the MIT/X open source license, before Dawes as the XFree86 president decided to change the XFree86 license[1]. The new license included an advertising clause and was therefore not compatible with the GNU GPL, which was protested by the GPL advocates such as Richard Stallman; however, it also drew protests from Theo de Raadt, Frédéric Lepied and others. While Dawes explained this as an attempt to make sure the XFree86 developers get their due credit (apparently in response to the Xouvert fork), the decision was contested in the XFree86 community, notably by Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, and the dissenters subsequently forked the project into the X.Org Server. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... GPL redirects here. ... Richard Matthew Stallman (frequently abbreviated to RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation. ... Theo de Raadt, pronounced de rot, (born May 19, 1968 in Pretoria, South Africa) is a software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. ... Frédéric Lepied (born 1967) is a French computer engineer, and the CTO of Mandriva till january 2006. ... Jim Gettys is a computer programmer. ... Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. ... The XOrg Foundation Open Source Public Implementation of X11 (the XOrg Server) is the official reference implementation of the X Window System. ...

David still heads XFree86 and continues to be geared to keeping XFree86 not only free and available for volunteers without corporate sponsorships (vs X.org which is a corporate sponsored consortium). And he runs his own small private company called X-Oz Technologies, a pun of David previously being from Oz (Australia) and his lifelong devotion to XFree86.

X-Oz Technologies is dedicated to open source work for XFree86 and its allied technologies and one of its main initiativies is to make a user-level configurable X desktop which could be dynamically changed over the network.

External links

• Home page
• Page discussing the effects of XFree86 license changes
• The means to an X for Linux: an interview with David Dawes from XFree86.org (Matthew Arnison, CAT TV, June 1999)