X11 is not dead : it's the community who gets a say

As many in the community are aware, there is more drama brewing; this time it's around XOrg's development. It's quite telling that the developers [1] of a project such as XOrg don't seem to understand the fundamental principles of Free Software, FOSS or their own projects history. It's not the corporations or the developers who control the software : it's the users and the people who get the final say. The community and the market of ideas gets to say when Xorg (or X11) is truly dead, given there are still enough people who still need it.

If people feel the need to work on a "dead" project or idea, that is their right to do so. No one gets a say in how people choose to spend their time. Inevitably, it will be the community who gets to decide if an idea is truly dead, not any one entity.

It's becoming a dangerous precedent that developers or corporations believe they get to assert control over software they licensed under an appropriate Free Software license. This trend is not new but is alarmingly becoming a critical issue for the Free Software movement and the [GNU/]Linux communities going forward. It's the communities AND their users who should get the final say in the direction the ship should go. When an entity is not listening to the very real concerns of the community, then they should have the freedom to fork the project and move on. RedHat, Canonical and the GNOME Project have a history of failing to be good stewards in the Free Software community and people have the right to move on; these entities don't get a say at the end of the day.

X11 has a history littered with forks and implementations

Technically, based on the aforementioned developer's logic, the XOrg project should never have existed due to it being a fork of XFree86 against their wishes. At this point, the XOrg project is giving up their control by abandoning development or creating a hostile environment where development can't continue. Creating such an environment means the project, in practice, immediately will lose control over X11's future and it will be in the hands of the forks that will drive X11 forward, if there is a need for such a thing.

X11 has warts

It's a personal opinion that X11 has a lot of warts but it has a long history and has been battle tested for decades. While not popular, many of the design choices made were warranted and many features part of X11 are important. I do believe that X11 should be replaced but many still don't see Wayland as an appropriate replacement.

Why is this issue important?

Free Software should be driven by BOTH the wishes of the individual users and collective communities. People should have FULL control over their computing and [GNU/]Linux distro vendors are quickly becoming as hostile towards their users as Microsoft is with the Windows operating system. It's not RedHat, Canonical or the GNOME Project who gets to decide what users can do with their computers; we are under no obligation to continue to be abused. At the end of the day, many of us want computers that are free from non-free blobs, needless bloat, telemetry or breakage of things that were solved many years ago. We also need to stop reinventing the wheel without a coherent purpose or plan. While I personally don't support the individual who is behind it, we should wish the XLibre fork luck and hopefully it's not the last time that X11 gets a new fork or implementation.

[1] - "You don't get to own Xorg. It belongs to the X.org foundation and community. X.org literary hosts and runs Wayland and Weston Xorg is dead and we killed it. And nobody regrets it." - Jordan Petridis