[ale] What divides Linux Distros?

[Tod Fassl]

My opinion is that the #1 reason that there are so many distros is that 
most human beings are incapable of suppressing their egos. Oh, there are 
other reasons as well. I have gone out and poked around for a distro 
that is optimized to run on a 486 in character mode. But I would guess 
that anybody who has actually worked in the open source community would 
agree, people just want to roll their own. It takes a strong, compelling 
reason to get most developers to take somebody else's code and improve 
it rather than starting from scratch. People don't want to get involved 
in existing projects, they want to start their own.



I mean, I've seen people refuse to work on an open source project 
because they didn't like the name. Debian, that's a stupid name, why 
would I work on that? [That's a made up example but it captures the point.]