Corporate or non-transparent controlled projects tend to not get many outside contributors. Sadly it's happening all over the place with various projects. One of the main reasons is that a lot of the corps want to get a copyright assignment(think sun with oo.o) from any contributor. This allows them to then turn those changes into their own profits.

Now some people wouldn't have a problem with that. But some do(more do than don't) and simply decide not to contribute.

The other thing is non-transparent governance. Any project that starts that way tends to not get a lot of developers. Any project that changes later has a lesser chance of losing a lot of the contributors but some will invariably leave.

Lord Raiden: wrt to corporately owned. Won't really happen. Mozilla corp is trying to sell xul to as many people as it can(and through it support I bet), redhat is selling support, suse is selling support, oracle is selling support, nokia is selling hardware, google is selling services and ads. So you see most corp owned/controlled software has some sort of financial plan but anything community tends to put the user first. And yes even small community distros have a higher chance of living for a long time than large corp controlled.

clasificado: the four freedoms of Free Software specify: free to use it as you see fit and for any purpose, free to modify it for any purpose, free to redistribute a modified version for any purpose, free to get the source of any version you get the binary to - this is just a quick run down and short

So yes freedom to fork is always valid. And no forking does NOT splinter the community. Sometimes a fork is helpful in a way that it will use more experimental options but feed those changes back to the origin. Sometimes a fork is necessary due to unknown future(MariaDB(I think that's the new name)(previously MySQL)), sometimes there are other issues(example Source Mage fork from Sorceror(the lead developer at the time decided that he will use his own proprietary license etc...). So yes there are many reasons for forks. Some are good some are bad(forking for the sake of forking is always bad).

See Linux(and yes I am talking about the kernel which is indeed called Linux - not any specific distribution which I would name distro, GNU/Linux etc...) itself... it's forked into so many places(basically each distro uses it's own) but they still all cooperate.