There has been quite a stir lately with respect to XFree86. Many third party companies are pledging support for their graphic chipsets for the project, and there have been many innovations that have occured not only inside XFree86 but in the X standards themselves. However, the XFree86 'core-group' of developers have been slow to adopt code contributed from third-party companies and certain fixes and advances. It has gotten so bad, that often graphic card companies will release drivers for their cards, but it may take up to 9 months before that code gets accepted into XFree86, and then another 3 to 6 months before it gets into a Linux distribution.
To see a developer's frustration on the matter, see [this].
Most recently, there was a big controversy involving one of the core XFree86 developers. This developer's motives weren't entirely clear, however, his actions were. He basically created some unapproved extensions and projects within XFree86, and apparently sought some help from outside the XFree86 core team in a possible coup. He was kicked out disgracefully from the core team and has since started the XWin.org (http://xwin.org/) web-site and community which may or may not be intending to fork XFree86.
