Forks are good. The pure Python ecosystem and core language developers have left package management and distribution in a very broken state for the scientific stack for way too long, and Continuum had to come in and fix the situation themselves. They did so, users followed, and they even released the result as open source under a compatible license. The rest of the python ecosystem has demonstrated unmitigated tone deafness to the requirements of the scientific ecosystem by not learning from and adopting more of the way conda does things.
Does winpython have a minimal core and a binary-only package management system on top of it? Do they have binaries for the likes of scipy, matplotlib, jupyter etc that work with pycall and ijulia? We can consider supporting it if it works, but if it doesn't work as well as Conda we shouldn't endorse it. Working software is what matters to users, more than ideology. If someone wants to fork Julia or its package management, we would welcome the brainstorming of ideas and as long as the license of any new additions remains MIT, we can incorporate the improvements. Most forkers would rather fold their improvements back upstream, eventually, especially with large fast-moving projects. Look at what happened with io.js and node.js over the last year. Python-dev should have done the same, but they didn't.
