Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

xterm originated prior to the X Window System. It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VAXStation 100 (VS100) by Mark Vandevoorde, a student of Jim Gettys, in the summer of 1984, when work on X started. It rapidly became clear that it would be more

useful as part of X than as a standalone program, so it was retargeted to X.

After many years as part of the X reference implementation, around 1996 the main line of development then shifted to XFree86 (which itself forked from X11R6.3), and it is now maintained by Thomas Dickey

Garrett Blythe created DosLynx in April 1994[20] and later joined the Lynx effort as well. Foteos Macrides ported much of Lynx to VMS and maintained it for a time. In 1995, Lynx was released under the GNU General Public License, and is now maintained by a group of volunteers led

by Thomas Dickey 

The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, for use with programs released as part of the GNU project. The original GPL was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU Emacs (1985),[16] the GNU Debugger, and the GNU C

Compiler.[17] These licenses contained similar provisions to the modern GPL, but were specific to each program, rendering them incompatible, despite being the same license.[18] Stallman's goal was to produce one license that could be used for any project, thus making it possible

for many projects to share code.

The second version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991. Over the following 15 years, members of the free software community became concerned over problems in the GPLv2 license that could let someone exploit GPL-licensed software in

ways contrary to the license's intent.

These problems included tivoization (the inclusion of GPL-licensed software in hardware that refuses to run modified versions of its software), compatibility issues similar to those of the Affero General Public License, and patent deals

between Microsoft and distributors of free and open-source software, which some viewed as an attempt to use patents as a weapon against the free software community.

Version 3 was developed to attempt to address these concerns and was officially released on 29 June 2007.

The LGPL was developed as a compromise between the strong copyleft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and more permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The word "Lesser" in the title shows that the LGPL does not guarantee the end user's complete

freedom in the use of software; it only guarantees the freedom of modification for components licensed under the LGPL, but not for any proprietary components.

Software without prior written authorization from the X Consortium.

X Window System is a trademark of X Consortium, Inc

In common usage there is only one MIT license, as illustrated by Github's licensing advice and the legal text for the MIT License at Github's service choosealicense.com.
More precisely, MIT has been using many licenses for software since its creation, so the phrase "the

MIT License" is theoretically ambiguous.[15] For example, MIT offers four licensing options for the FFTW[16] C source code library, one of which is the GPLv 2.0 and the other three of which are not open-source.
"MIT License" may refer to the Expat License (used for the XML

parsing library Expat)[17] or to the X11 License (also called "MIT/X Consortium License"; used for X Window System by the MIT X Consortium).[18] The "MIT License" published by the Open Source Initiative[13] is the same as the "Expat License".

The X Consortium was dissolved late in 1996, and its assets transferred to The Open Group,[19] which released X11R6 initially under the same license. The X11 License[18] and the X11R6 "MIT License" chosen for ncurses by the Free Software Foundation[20] both include the following

The X.Org Foundation has chosen the following format of the MIT License as the preferred format for code included in the X Window System distribution. This is a slight variant of the common MIT license form published by the Open Source Initiative

The "slight variant" is the addition of the phrase "(including the next paragraph)".