Actually I agree, I wasn't trying to emphasize their feelings as much as question if there is really such a thing as a friendly fork. In reality it shouldn't matter and the concept be void, if someone forks your project and it is successful you should be glad you don't have to anymore and can do something else, as well as benefit from the improved software.
If you like what they added, you can merge it into your version unless they chose an incompatible license for their work. (That's one reason the GPL is so important: it prevents such incompatible licensing.) So if the forks continue unmerged, it likely signals some kind of difference of opinion: perhaps over technical quality, perhaps over tradeoffs, perhaps over licensing. The humans frequently turn such differences of opinion into chimpanzee factional dominance games similar to football, but in principle there is no need for that. I don't know of any LuaJIT users denigrating the hygiene and ancestry of PUC-Lua users, for example, nor vice versa, but surely it has happened on one occasion or another.
Fighting over "who gets to donate their time for free" is absurd. Unless you are one of those pretend open source companies that sell commercial versions and prevents certain cloud based usage.
