XFree86

XFree86, once a highly important part of any GNU/Linux desktop, has become entirely irrelevant and superseded through their own mismanagement. No project can survive when the set of productive developers and the set of committers remains disjoint for so long. The gratuitous license change just served as the last straw. All interesting development and users have moved over to X.org.

XFree86 did amazing things in its day, but it had trouble changing to a more open way of development in a changing world.

This is why some Xfree86 people formed a revived X.org out of the undead X.org project at the time. The bad image that xfree86 has today is entirely due to the actions and statements of people for purely political and egoistic reasons.

Truth is that, X.org was already being set up, quietly, without too much fuss.

Then someone got his face bashed in at xfree86 because he committed highly untested code very late in the release cycle. This person, who was aware of X.org being set up quietly, then made a big stink with the sole purpose of inflating his own image.

What followed is several years of religious and political heated noise and a total development impasse.

I am not putting the blame all on side here, some blame is also to be put on the reactions of David Dawes and some others, but those guys are not the super-villains that the other side has consistently made them out to be. Alsd note the word "reactions" used, they were pushed in that corner.

Now everyone is on X.org, and unlike in the XFree86 days, where the project was highly stable but also very static, X.org is a free for all, with decreasing quality and stability only meagerly kept under wraps by decreasing the codebase. And political affiliation is now much more important than providing good technical solutions.

X.org has become the exact opposite of Xfree86, while everyone would've been much better off when we ended up halfway. And i firmly believe that we are currently only working against the linux/free software desktop instead of helping it along.