Lucas Nussbaum suggests that Linux distributions should have a place to collaborate more effectively than just with upstream projects:
I am both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer, and I’m sometimes amazed that Ubuntu discusses technical choices that were discussed (and solved) a few weeks earlier in Debian. And it’s even worse with the other big distros out there.
Couldn’t we try to improve this ?
More and more I believe that open code itself is insufficient. Encouraging and participating in a healthy community around the project is necessary for both free software and open source.
It's a common problem that we as a FOSS community have. Not invented here! I have advocated this for awhile because it seems that certain distros make great strides in certain areas but refuse to use what others have done well. The common response that I get is generally some form of apathy.
One reason I like Gentoo, a source code based distribution, is that it can build RPM's. I wish other distributions, such as RedHat, Debian and DSL, would band together to enhance Gentoo so it could be used to build their packages from the Gentoo source tree. This way their enhancements would more quickly get into other distributions thus helping all Linux users.