rahmu wroteI hate that threefold desktop vision (Windows or MacOS or Linux). There are thousands of different OS available. Sometimes they will cooperate, sometimes they won't. But stop thinking in terms of LINUX OS.
You do make an excellent point, rahmu. I often do fall into the mistake of treating Linux the kernel as Linux the OS.
I don't think anyone disagrees that having many Linux distributions is a good thing and that it's not the same as "Windows" or "Mac OS". The issue, though, is that unlike Windows and Mac,
all these distributions depend on common code.
It's the nature of open source.
Fedora and Ubuntu were both using GNOME before Ubuntu switched. That means that they
had to collaborate to improve GNOME, other wise
both their systems would suck and they wouldn't be competitive. There's nothing
wrong with Ubuntu switching to Unity, or GNOME completely changing their interface. However there's definitely
something wrong when these changes make it difficult for
common code to run across the different systems.
We can only fix that with standards, and standards need collaboration. :D
So you see, encouraging standardization and collaboration, especially in the desktop space, actually helps competition in the Linux ecosystem.