Wikipedia says that "The protocol has been version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987".
That's almost 30 years.
Why did the X protocol freeze?
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Like any good protocol the X11 Protocol includes extensibility (ListExtensions, page 198 or the X Porotocol Reference Manual, 2nd printing 1990). Similarily like with fileformats such as TIFF that allow extensions, this reduces the need for yet another version with some options very few people need. Combine that with a well thought out and tested base protocol and there is no need to destabilize things. That doesn't mean the protocol cannot be improved, but the cost of doing so, by destabilizing/decreasing interoperability, is not worth it.
Anthon
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Really, it's anyone's guess: but look at the progression of versions and dates and see where the funding went. As funding dried up, the project was morphed from an MIT project to a separate (non-profit) X Consortium to The Open Group. If there's no fundamentally new technology and (barring bumping the version number for marketing purposes), you're likely to just see a flattening of version numbers.
Thomas Dickey
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It is not really frozen, just X has some strange versioning schema, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Release_history . Some versions were never released. From X11 version we have many releases: e.g. now we are at X11R7.7.
Giacomo Catenazzi
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