I think the author is missing something that makes Open Source work that few people appreciate. It's a fundamentally lossy development model. A certain number of patches/features end up in /dev/null for any Open Source project.
You can think of each "fork" as a new start-up trying out a new idea. But instead of reinventing the entire world, they get to start with a functioning product. The vast majority of these start-ups will fail but the ability to experiment (and fail) with forking is fundamentally what makes Open Source development better (at least IMHO) than proprietary development.
A lot of people look toward Open Source development thinking that there's a lot of wasted development and that that's a problem worth solving, but that's like the government trying to make 100% of businesses successful.
You can think of each "fork" as a new start-up trying out a new idea. But instead of reinventing the entire world, they get to start with a functioning product. The vast majority of these start-ups will fail but the ability to experiment (and fail) with forking is fundamentally what makes Open Source development better (at least IMHO) than proprietary development.
A lot of people look toward Open Source development thinking that there's a lot of wasted development and that that's a problem worth solving, but that's like the government trying to make 100% of businesses successful.