X.Org Foundation + SPI Merger Fails

After almost two years of the X.Org Foundation's Board of Directors pursuing a merger with SPI, the 2015 X.Org Elections have ended and the results were sent out to X.Org members last night.

On the question of changing the X.Org by-laws to allow the foundation to become a sub-project of SPI, there was certainly a lot of interest in seeing it happened... 85% of those that voted were interested in seeing that happen, but they failed to gain enough votes in total.

As part of the current X.Org by-laws there's an amendment stating that for altering/amending/repealing the X.Org by-laws, there needs to be an affirmative vote by at least two-thirds of the members of X.Org. The issue is that this year's elections didn't reach a two-thirds vote, even if everyone that voted had voted in favor of this decision.

There's currently 69 members to the X.Org Foundation but only 41 voted, of which 35 voted in favor of the by-law change, two voted no, and four abstained. Thus only half of the overall X.Org members voted to change the by-laws, which is why it failed after two years of hard work. This also comes after the X.Org Foundation had expired all accounts earlier in the year to force members to re-sign-up, in hopes of further boosting the turnout to not run into this issue -- considering in past years they were close to not even reaching a quorum on normal voting.

It will be interesting to see what the X.Org Foundation will pursue next now that the SPI merger is a no-go. In terms of the election of new board members, Peter Hutterer, Martin Peres, Rob Clark, and Daniel Vetter are the newly elected board of directors.