Mandriva was based on Red Hat at one point. PCLinuxOS was based no Mandriva at one point. PCLinuxOS is not based on Red Hat. You can create a distro from scratch if you want. Or you can chose to start with an existing one and go from there. What you do from there is up to you. You can choose to closely follow the original one or you can chose to go on your own. What matters is that you execute well. No need to sow FUD.

Did I say it was? Did any one say it was. I don't think that had any thing to do with the decision. I am sure it was a factor that was considered and it was determined that it did not mattered enough. After all, Debian is not the only distro with thousands of apps in its repositories. Apps that are worthwhile are available on any of the many popular high quality distros. In my laptop I currently run PClinuxOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. I can run any app I want on any of them. So, I only switch between them to test stuff. For pleasure, I run PCLinuxOS.

Can you be more specific?

What Fedora standards? Are you a developer? What dramatic change are you talking about?

Hmm, well yes. That is usually how it works. However, if packages are built using the Standard Base they usually work fine. For example, Adobe releases its color profiles for Linux in RPM format. They install just fine in Fedora, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS (I haven't tried in Ubuntu).

And the same is true for debs.