This might be a little cynical, but Debian was originally intended to be the Master Distribution that would function as a sort of open source gatekeeper for the

This might be a little cynical, but Debian was originally intended to be the Master Distribution that would function as a sort of open source gatekeeper for the Linux world. However, it ended up shipping late and RedHat derivatives got a foothold. If it wasn't for Ubuntu, it would have never fulfilled it's original intention at all. Also, since I'm commenting here, that chart shows a whole lot of completely dead distributions continuing onto the right. It would be a lot more interesting to see how long these forks actually lasted.