Rosenthal: X Window System At 40

David Rosenthal looksback at 40 years of the X Window System:

A major reason for Sun's early success was that they in effectopen-sourced the Network File System. X11 was open source under theMIT license. I, and some of the other Sun engineers, understoodthat NeWS could not displace X11 as the Unix standard window systemwithout being equally open source. But Sun's management looked atNeWS and saw superior technology, an extension of the PostScriptthat Adobe was selling, and couldn't bring themselves to give itaway.