Consortium, Inc. (a non-profit corporation) formed as the successor to the MIT X Consortium. It released X11R6 on 16 May 1994. In 1995 it took on the development of the Motif toolkit and of the Common Desktop Environment for Unix systems. The X Consortium dissolved at the end of 1996, producing a final revision, X11R6.3, and a legacy of increasing commercial influence in the development. The Open Group In January 1997, the X Consortium passed stewardship of X to The Open Group, a vendor group formed in early 1996 by the merger of the Open Software Foundation and X/Open. The Open Group released X11R6.4 in early 1998. Controversially, X11R6.4 departed from the traditional liberal licensing terms, as the Open Group sought to assure funding for the development of X, and specifically cited XFree86 as not significantly contributing to X. The new terms would have made X no longer free software: zero-cost for noncommercial use, but a fee otherwise. After XFree86 seemed poised to fork, the Open Group relicensed X11R6.4 under the traditional license in September 1998. The Open Group's last release came as X11R6.4 patch 3. X.Org and XFree86 XFree86 originated in 1992 from the X386 server for IBM PC compatibles included with X11R5 in 1991, written by Thomas Roell and Mark W. Snitily and donated to the MIT X Consortium by Snitily Graphics Consulting Services (SGCS). XFree86 evolved over time from just one port of X to the leading and most popular implementation and the de facto standard of X's development. In May 1999, The Open Group formed X.Org. X.Org supervised the release of versions X11R6.5.1 onward. X development at this time had become moribund; most technical innovation since the X Consortium had dissolved had taken place in the XFree86 project. In 1999, the XFree86 team joined X.Org as an honorary (non-paying) member, encouraged by various hardware companies interested in using XFree86 with Linux and in its status as the most popular version of X. By 2003, while the popularity of Linux (and hence the installed base of X) surged, X.Org remained inactive, and active development took place largely within XFree86. However, considerable dissent developed within XFree86. The XFree86 project suffered from a perception of a far too cathedral-like development model; developers could not get CVS commit access and vendors had to maintain extensive patch sets. In March 2003, the XFree86 organization expelled Keith Packard, who had joined XFree86