There is a huge political battle going on. There is a lot of fairly overheated retoric being slung about because of this.

The real problem seems to be that XFree86 development is grinding to a halt. There are not enough developers being given access to update the code, to the point that patches are taking 6 months or more to be applied. Development of new features such as rendered fonts or direct hardware is only done when developed by some outside group and given to the XFree team.

But this argument is turning up the various other problems of X, such as the ancient hardware model, obsolete interfaces and the amount of cruft included in the standard X distribution.

I expect to see the development team split at least once and there will probably be one or more independent projects setup to replace part or all of X11.

Jay