The XFree86 team seems determind to consign itself to irrelevancy. Between the development process that could best be described as 'stagnant' and the alienation of valuable contributors like Keith Packard, it was inevitable that something had to happen. Something did.

Just prior to the release of XFree86 4.4, the XFree86 team changed their license to mandate a so-called "advertising clause", which turns out to make the license incompatible with the GPL. This created a backlash and eventually led to the [forking] of the XFree86 project.

A version of XFree86 just prior to the license changes was taken and is now hosted on the freedesktop.org servers. It maintains a license compatible with the GPL and is set to be included in several distributions, including Fedora and Mandrake.

xorg (thing)