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It's the same as with all other news items: the negative ones draw much more attentions than the positive ones. (How often do you hear about death in the news? and how often about birth? If that ratio mirrored reality, there would be nobody left by now).
Also quite often projects don't merge, but still work together because one uses the other project's software as a library. | [reply] |
Heard of DateTime? Thats kind of a merge :) | [reply] |
Only sort of. DateTime.pm was originally based on Date::ICal, but the project as a whole has mostly ended up recreating everything ever other date module has ever done.
The problem was that there was lots of functionality in many distros, all with radically different APIs. I suppose we could've just written the mother of all wrapping layers, but I think overall it was easier to just write most things from scratch. This also required even less buy-in or cooperation from authors of the existing modules at the time.
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It happens quite a bit it just doesn't get reported so very often but it is not stange for this to happen. An other thing that you will see is one of the forks dying due to to little development time being spend on it and the left over core developers moving over to a different fork of the same root.
Another often seen situation is several opensource projects, be they forks of the same root or not, providing updates and bug fixes to another project whose code they use. The open source community is a very incestuous bunch in that respect, but they seem to like it and so far it works well for them.
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