Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.[9] A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.
Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a secure[10][11][12][13] and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.[9][14] The project’s source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software license.[14][6] The Wayland project also develops an implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.[9].