The WAX team noted that they tested many blockchains and all of them, except for EOS, were found wanting. EOS was chosen because "it is the superior base technology". This isn't the first nor the last time developers will say this. Each time they do, it telegraphs to the rest of the world that EOS is not only something to watch but something to act on.

But still it's kind of weak if they just take the software and don't give anything back. Nice words are not necessarily worth anything.

EOS is an operating system. Think about Linux, not all existing Linux distributions satisfy all of the needs of every user so some create their own distributions. Does the number of Linux distros harm or help the overall Linux ecosystem? Many would argue that it helps - tools and applications created for one distro are fed back into the community and implemented on other distros. This bodes well for the EOS.IO software development life cycle and could lead to future improvements.

Blockchains are different compared to any other open source project. The network effect suffers every time a blockchain is forked to two branches. Most value comes when all users are able to be part of the same ecosystem.

I dislike this attitude of creating new blockchains for every possible project. It just makes the blockchain revolution harder because the ecosystem becomes fragmented.

WAX is in the top 90 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization at the time of this writing. We're venturing the guess that they have more resources at their disposal compared to the average developer group. Building your own blockchain, even if based on other code, is time-consuming and expensive. Not to mention the cost of development and the cost of building out the hardware to host the network and/or building the community to participate in transaction validation (e.g. block producers) is very high. Most will not be able to take this route.

Yeah, it is expensive and stupid. That's why we should take care that developers are not encouraged to create their own blockchains when they can use EOS mainchain.

Block.One dreams of a world with not one chain but thousands or more. The EOS.IO protocol will enable inter-blockchain communication through merkle-proofs. Almost as good as building on top of EOS is building alongside it. WAX or any other developer group building a custom configured version of the EOS.IO protocol should be able to communicate with other EOS.IO chains, further cementing EOS.IO as the foundation of the blockchain ecosystem. The resulting network effect could increase the value of all involved.

But why would EOS accept a blockchain as its sidechain if it doesn't honor the token distribution?

AFAIK BPs are responsible for implementing a sidechain. So I'm not going to vote any BP who cooperates with projects that just copy the software and don't give anything back. I strongly recommend same to everybody. Just say no to parasites!

WAX doesn't have any real reason to create their own blockchain. They could implement their business logic just fine to EOS mainchain.