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

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.