1995 Technical Conference Review

State of the Consortium

Bob Scheifler, the president of the X Consortium gave the annual update on the state of X and the X Consortium. Scheifler (sporting a huge name badge with Bob insoide a circle and slash) announced (to the delight of the audience members) that he has decided to remain as President of the X Consortium. When the X Consortium was formed from the group at MIT, Scheifler's plans were to return to the research world. However, when the newly appointed president, Lou Abel, stepped down abruptly, Scheifler was appointed interim president, and has since decided to rejoin the organization permanently. In other personnel news, a number of new folks (many from OSF) have joined the Consortium to handle marketing, QA and engineering tasks. Scheifler also stated (also to the delight of the audience members) that the 10th conference will be held in January 1996 in the more temperate San Francisco Bay area.

A major goal of the Consortium is to increase the acceptance of X in the market place. Towards this end, the X Consortium has added a marketing director, Paul Lavallee. New, lower cost membership categories for end users and US and foreign government are designed to attract interest from these communities. Members may join at the start of any quarter, not at just the beginning of the year. The Consortium has also added a job posting board for its member companies (which anyone can search for jobs).

A number of projects are under development under the auspices of the Consortium. These projects include such tasks as support for external agents (programs which monitor X applications), dynamic loading of server extensions, double buffering, extended visuals and the ongoing PEXlib graphics effort. The X Consortium is working on the next version of CDE, which is in the planning stages. Fresco has a number of new features added to it, and now runs natively on Windows NT. Discussions are currently underway regarding the merger of features of Fresco with those of the OpenDoc effort. The Low-Bandwidth X effort continues to mature, and a final specification is being developed. The RECORD and KEYBOARD extensions are now in public review. The X Consortium is also examining support for multimedia X, both by a public workshop held after the conference, and through its efforts in developing an audio standard, CommonAudio. Printing, long considered outside the province of the X Window System, is at least being targeted for standardization. Finally, security issues in X, particularly running X through corporate firewalls, are being addressed.

The text of Scheifler's viewgraphs may be obtained from the nearest mirror site for the X Consortium ftp site. To find the site nearest you, use a WWW browser to examine the URL

   http://www.x.org/consortium/GettingX11R6.html .

Last updated: 10 July 1996

Miles O'Neal <roadkills.r.us@XYZZY.gmail.com> [remove the "XYZZY." to make things work!] c/o RNN / 1705 Oak Forest Dr / Round Rock, TX / 78681-1514