Anybody know really what happened to cause the shift from
the traditional open source branch of X -- Xfree86 to Xorg ??

I mean Xorg is Big for profit corporation consortium right where you participate if you come up with a huge chunk of money and the "task forces" that work on the stuff the corporations say to work on get paid ??? and the Current cvs version is handled by a paid contractor and is not open to the public ??

please correct if i am wrong.

Where Xfree86 has a board of directors who are not involved in the developement process.
The core group of developers controll the project apart from monetary or market share concerns as it should be.
The only changes i know of they did was open up the mailing list and cvs read only to the public.
I can't see how that is bad or how the use of a corperate driven version of x will do anything but ruin X and how it interfaces with the rest of Linux software.
Now there will be all a big corporate rush to implement a bunch of overly complex crap so the API can be "elegant" as Sun and M$ like to say and support "the right" propriatary hardware and the performance will all go to &*^# and when we want to go back to Xfree it will be dead in the water.

I would like to get a brief summary of what the deal is with XFree/Xorg as well. I haven't read up on it because I've been busy lately, but I thought XFree was the one that turned into a for profit corporation and thus Xorg branched off as the new free open source guys. So either I have the story backwards or you do.

My very very very small understanding is Xfree pissed people off with licensing, even as far up as Alan Cox; Xorg was an alternative that people decided was a viable alternative.

Cool

yea, xorg is a split from xfree86 right before xf86 changed license so it might be incompatible with the GPL, (they say whats not true, but refuse to modify the license to clarify things ... hmmmm)

xorg i think is also looking to implement some things from freedesktop.org, like the composite extension (which can make it possible for true translucent windows should the users want it)