I think some people may want to take over Unity 8 and continue developing it. An obvious characteristic of the open source community is divergence, which means forking an existing project or reinventing wheels. Although I'm a GTK developer, I also think Unity is a good desktop environment because of its usability to the non-technical user. But, I still don't like the Canonical's work style that reinvents too many things, such as Bazaar. I like Launchpad for its convenience, while I think Bazaar is awful compared with Git.