The open-source community has tried to avoid the fate of Unix, which lost much of its strength when commercial vendors tried to differentiate their products by making proprietary modifications to the core code base. Funneling all Linux code through a small set of gatekeepers has kept the Linux kernel from forking to date, but it also has contributed to bottlenecks and delays in delivering major new updates. The company made the decision to fork its code base in order to appease two warring camps. Posters to the Linux enthusiast site Slashdot.org reacted swiftly to the news about Samba. We need this like we need a hole in the head.
Open source seems to be a great forum for encouraging childish behavior.
Not everyone was so critical, however. I think this could be cool. A number of open source advocates claimed the Samba fork would not actually amount to a fork, since the development team said it had no plans to commercialize the Samba TNG results but planned to incorporate the code back into Samba 3. Samba did not immediately respond to requests for clarification. The freedom to fork is good.