It's hard to remember, but back in 1997 forking was considered really terrible and to be avoided at all costs. When we split off to form egcs the main resistance was to the idea that there would be a fork at all. Gcc, and a bunch of other programs, had a single person who controlled the "official" release. The fact that Cygnus maintained its own release tree for its customers (it was still free -- it simply wasn't identical to the mainline, and in fact advanced a lot faster) was the cause of much angst and even some mistrust.
My reason for making this fork was because the mainline was so far behind us, and we had a commitment to folding all our changes back into the main line. Since the gcc maintainer was the bottleneck, we simply declared our tree a new fork with the support and participation of other major developers. We were trying to be the opposite of exclusivist. But even so it took me months of mailing, calling and negotiating. Many hours on the phone with rms who of course predicted the doom of free software if we went ahead.
And we developed a steering committee, the first as far as I know for a free software project.
In those two ways egcs was a watershed; plenty of developers thankfully now know no other way.
So last year glibc went the opposite way: it decided it no longer needed a steering committee. Cool!
