RedHat censored a lead Xorg dev – it's been forked as Xlibre

3 days ago 2

Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult info at metux.net
Fri Jun 6 13:50:32 UTC 2025

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Hello everybody, this morning, Redhat employees banned me from the freedesktop.org gitlab infrastructure - so censored all my work (not just on Xorg). They killed my account, my git repos, my tickets in Xorg and closed all my merge requests. And then making fun on social media about it. They fired the shot that's heared around the world. So much for freedesktop.org being "independent" and embracing freedom. Perhaps we should nominate them for the next Orwell award. It's now clear that freedesktop.org *is* the Redskirts, and they want to kill X. By the way, the same corporation that tied to proprietarize a lot of FOSS code, including the Linux kernel (and I've been one of those who warned them about terminating our license grants them). My most evil heresies probably were: a) forking Xorg and making *actual progress* b) talking to a journalist whose name must not be spoken in many other Redhat/IBM tax evasion outlets, like GNOME (they're also banning honorable long time contributors for just mentioning that name) c) inviting *anybody* to join me, without discrimination I don't know why, but it really looks they're quite scared by one guy that's just trying to actually bring X11 forward. Hard to find he right words for telling how honored I'm about that. This didn't actually surprise me, I knew this would be coming for about a year now. Just didn't expect them to do such an extremely irrational and dumb move. Now I'm taking great pleasure seeing the Streisand effect kicking in (my inbox is exploding). Thanks for that great publicity. It's not the first time this happens in FOSS world, and it's not the first time it's happening in X: remember what Xfree86 board did to the honorable Keith Packard, back about two decades ago - what lead to the birth of Xorg and the death of Xfree86. Same is happening again. History repeats itself. And now the Redskirts placed me onto the same stage as the great honorable Keith Packard. WOOOOW. Just to be clear, I didn't want to fork, I tried my best to work together with the Xorg team. But I knew for long time, this day would come. Xorg has been captured by Redhat, in order to get rid of destroy competition. The necessary consequence is a fork, more competition. For those interested in bringing X forward, feel free to join the mailing list: https://www.freelists.org/list/xlibre Git repo: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver.git I'm expecting to be banned from whole freedesktop.org mail system, too. Excommunication unfortunately had become a common thing in the so-called "free software" world - GNOME is just one of many examples. So if you don't hear anymore from me on freedesktop.org lists, you know what's going on. Join the xlibre mailing list to stay tuned. Together, we'll make X great again. have fun, --mtx -- --- Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult Free software and Linux embedded engineering info at metux.net -- +49-151-27565287