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hapless

It's worth noting this is not the first time that X has become abandonware.

It's not even the second time.

This is the third time X development has been abandoned. And yet, millions of us use X11 every day.

Don't hold your breath for Wayland to replace X11.

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I am curious, what are the others?

When XFree86 was forked to X.org, is that what you call the first?

XFree86 was itself a fork.

What's the difference between X11 and xfree86 (and I guess Xorg)?

XFree86 was an implementation of the X11 protocol. X.org is a fork of the XFree86 project (short version: XF86 license changed, and a huge chunk of the core contributors saw that as the final reason to take their work elsewhere).

XFree86 was a fork of X11R5.

I thought it was R6.

If you're talking about forks, they're pretty much the complete opposite of abandonment. Forks exist because people want to work on the code.

In these cases, forks were deeply interconnected with project abandonment

X11 gave us XFree86, because changes to the X386 server weren't being merged. There wasn't much of an alternative to forking.

Xorg was forked from XFree86 over a license change, but after the fork, XFree86 died -- its maintainers were unable or unwilling to merge changes or do releases.

That's a different concept of abandonment to what's happening with the Xorg server code today.

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