I recently read about Debian changing from the GNU C Library (GLIBC) library to the new Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) library. This may be the beginning of a sweeping change similar to the GCC vs. EGCS or XFree86 vs. Xorg changes in the past.
The source of the change is the controversial nature of the lead maintainer, but the story is as old as FOSS itself. The ability to fork a project exists to protect the users of software from having their rights hijacked by the developers. This is one of the most important advantages of FOSS over most other development philosophies. The user should never have to beg for bugs to be fixed, especially when there are large groups of users doing the begging.
I do wonder how Red Hat will handle this. I know that Red Hat is still considered the most commercially viable Linux, but one of their employee (or at least someone with a redhat.com email address) has created enough problems that a large, generally conservative and GNU-friendly project like Debian is willing to risk a fork of a core GNU library.
