This is what Garry Paxinos, Vice President of Metro Link Incorporated says
about the cooperation between Metro Link and The XFree86 Project.
Metro Link recognizes the importance of the Linux operating system
in the world market and was the first company to ship commercial
software for Linux. As a contributing sponsor of the XFree86 Project,
Metro Link donates many of their developments and enhancements back
to the XFree86 Project.
Some of Metro Link's technological donations that will be included
in the XFree86-4.0 release are:
- DYNAMIC LOADER TECHNOLOGY
Developed a new loader
architecture and specific implementations for ELF, COFF, and XCOFF
objects, making it possible for the X server to load these modules
at runtime. This eliminates the need to rebuild X server binaries and
allows developers to distribute updated modules without having to
touch any other files. Server extensions can be loaded and unloaded
as needed.
- STAND-ALONE CONFIG FILE PARSING
Wrote and modularized
the configuration parsing software, which helps to make one of the
more fragile parts of the current XFree86 code more stable and easier
to extend.
- SUPPORT FOR POWERMAX OS
Did a PCI redesign to work better
on different architectures, including Concurrent's PowerMax OS.
- CLOSE COOPERATION IN DESIGN WORK AND BUG FIXING
Metro Link places its donations, including the dynamic loader
technology, under an X Consortium-style copyright, so that the
technology will be truly free. This gives the XFree86 Project the
right to use the donated source code for any purpose.
The donated software is also part of Metro-X, Metro Link's commercial
X server, which continues to be used in demanding mission-critical
environments. For more information on this or any of the Metro Link
products for Linux, please visit the
Metro Link website.
XFree86 (TM) is pending trademark registration by The XFree86 Project,
Inc.
Copyright (C) 1998, The XFree86 Project, Inc., All
rights reserved.