Reinventing the wheel is sometimes viewed as a significant barrier to the development of open source software. Critics point out that if developers simply collaborated more with each other, instead of creating yet another Linux distribution or programming another text editor, this would help to simplify matters for users, and actually significantly advance the development of established open source projects.
Personally, I like choice. Having the opportunity to select from dozens of mainstream Linux distributions and choose the one that best fits my requirements works really well. The same applies for the individual applications that are included in a Linux distribution.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/article.php?story=20100626074929552