The X.Org Foundation is the organization holding the stewardship for the development of the X Window System. It was founded on 22 January 2004.

The modern X.Org Foundation came into being when the body that oversaw X standards and published the official reference implementation joined forces with former XFree86 developers. The creation of the Foundation marked a radical change in the governance of X (see the history of the X Window System). Whereas the stewards of X since 1988 (including the previous X.Org, part of The Open Group) had been vendor organizations, the Foundation is led by software developers and using community development on the bazaar model, which relies on outside involvement. Membership is also open to individuals, with corporate membership being in the form of sponsorship.

The Foundation is a Delaware LLC, with non-profit status as a scientific charity. As of January 2008, the Board of Directors consists of Secretary Bart Massey (Portland State University), Treasurer Keith Packard (Intel Corporation), Eric Anholt (Intel Corporation), Egbert Eich (SUSE/Novell), Matthieu Herrb, Adam Jackson (Red Hat), Daniel Stone (Collabora), and Carl Worth (Intel Corporation).

Brian E. Paul is a computer programmer who originally wrote and continues to maintain the source code for the open source Mesa graphics library. Paul began programming initial source code in August 1993. Mesa is a free software/open source graphics library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platforms. Though Mesa is not an officially licensed OpenGL implementation, the structure, syntax and semantics of the API is that of OpenGL.

Paul obtained his bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in 1990. He worked on the SSEC Visualization Project while obtaining his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Paul was a graphics hobbyist. He thought it would be fun to implement a simple 3D graphics library using the OpenGL API, which he might then use instead of VOGL. He spent eighteen months of part-time development before he released the software on the Internet. The software was well received, and people began contributing to its development. Graphics hardware support was added to Mesa in 1997 in the form of a Glide driver for the new 3dfx Voodoo graphics card.

Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System.

Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium,XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation.

Packard gained a BA in mathematics from Reed College, Oregon in 1986. He worked at Tektronix, Inc. in Wilsonville, Oregon designing X terminals and Unix workstations from 1983 until 1988.

He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology X Consortium from 1988 to 1992, developing the X Window System reference implementation and standards as the senior member of a small team. He was responsible for X releases at this time.

In 1992 he moved to Portland, Oregon to work for Network Computing Devices on X terminals and computer graphics.

From 1999 he worked for SuSE from his home in Portland, Oregon on the XFree86 implementation of X.