This is a kind of odd retelling/interpretation of events, considering the “rogue” contributor version is the only one that lived and XFree86 is history.
They envisioned a world in which they needed license changes to block the fork from stealing all their work... And worthwhile contributions from their side did not materialize.
Spurred by this discussion I read this old email thread linked by Wikipedia: https://web.archive.org/web/20030821073445/http://xfree86.or...
This is a year before the license change I think?
You will note that Keith is directly blamed for the fork and undermining XFree86. It sounds like there is also resentment for how XRENDER was done, also driven by Keith, but it would seem with more cooperation within the project. We know that the fork was the victor in history and XFree86 looks unreasonable to most observers but I was merely trying to accurately convey the other side in the dispute, without taking their side.
It does seem like there were a bit of tensions between "Linux on the desktop" types (driven by end user visible features and represented by the fork) and more conservative "old hand at X" types present in the thread, resisting such changes, maybe sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad. Though when I google around, it seems Keith and others were active in X before the rise of Linux.