>And there are also the credit implications. Why let someone else get credit for a platform you only slightly contributed to when you can seemingly get all of it, just fork!
Please. That has nothing to do with free software. Even large companies like Microsoft will steal other people's code. The only difference is that they have deep pockets if you can afford to sue them.
> Look at all the fragmentation in the thousands of Linux distro forks. Wait one fucking second, I though Linux didn't ever need defragmenting. Oh yeah, nm...
Don't look at forks as such a bad thing. They're an opportunity to branch out and try new things. Yes, sometimes people try stupid things, but they are also an opportunity to try exciting things.
SUSE forked Red Hat, but added delta rpms. These finally found their way back into Fedora. The whole SUSE project was a success in experimenting with updates over dialup, but they also got a chance to experiment with many other things, and on the whole while SUSE failed, many other things were possible as well.
Xandros and Ubuntu both forked Debian, but while Xandros has replaced the Debian build system, Ubuntu tries to stay in it.
Sometimes, we fork for political reasons, or for social ones (maybe the developer is an asshole). Sometimes we fork because the new product isn't exactly like the old product at all. How could anyone reconcile Gentoo's portage- the antithesis of QA with other system?
Building inside someone elses' system may be better for incremental improvements, but it does nothing but hinder large changes.