Thanks, that's a good observation of traditional (online?) community evolution.

It seems like software could potentially be a little different though, given zero-cost-of-copy, zero-cost-of-communication, and zero barriers (other than social inertia) to learning, inspection, modification and contribution of code.

Perhaps sufficiently-sized communities require fragmentation in order to function effectively (it certainly happens within large organizations) - that happens fairly naturally already with software projects too, though, so there may not necessarily be a scalability or community-size limit concern there.