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Freedesktop.org

Freedesktop-logo.svg
The logo of freedesktop.org
Type of site
Software development management system
Available in English
Created by Havoc Pennington
Website www.freedesktop.org
Alexa rank 27,110 (as of November 2016)
Commercial No
Launched March 2000; 16 years ago (2000-03)
Current status Online

freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000. The project is hosted by Software in the Public Interest, the non-profit organization created by the Debian Project.

There are many development frameworks for X, and this is unlikely to change. The organization seeks to ensure that differences in development frameworks are not user-visible.

Widely used open-source X desktop projects—such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce—are collaborating with the freedesktop.org project. In 2006, the project released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments.

freedesktop.org was formerly known as the X Desktop Group, and the abbreviation "XDG" remains common in their work.

freedesktop.org provides hosting for a number of relevant projects. These include:

Software related to windowing systems and graphics in general

Also, Avahi (a free Zeroconf implementation) started as a fd.o project but has now moved elsewhere.

The project aims to catch interoperability issues much earlier in the process. It is not for legislating formal standards.


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