Fragmentation in software is not the same as competing laundry detergents, even by the same company. I'm not a detergent engineer (a real job title?), but I bet

Fragmentation in software is not the same as competing laundry detergents, even by the same company. I'm not a detergent engineer (a real job title?), but I bet that if the scent in one detergent proves popular, it's not so hard to add it to another. By contrast, if there are 30 branches of an OS, although it does allow different ideas to compete, it also divides up the efforts of people who want to contribute, and even complicates the decision to contribute at all. And it's not always trivial to take good ideas from one project and port them to another. Is fragmentation overall good or bad? Hard to say. But it does present challenges that go beyond just competition. In short, sometimes the most helpful answer to "I'm not happy with the direction of this project" is not "fork it," but "talk and compromise or deal with it."