Open source needs more competition of each other. Not only One Project to pour into, but multitudes borrowing, reshaping, remixing. Every one a user, leader, and contributor.

There could be natural fork points when the cost of keeping up with upstream is as expensive as merging one's patches atop it.

Huh, so sometimes one may rewrite the same patch on top of latest mainline, the same ideas they happen to be most familiar with for their use case. Then the code was just a container for the idea.