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Software GNU is Not Unix

Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom 211

Posted by Hemos from the controversial-ideas dept.
Eugenia Loli-Queru writes "In the news media, it is generally shown that flame wars and forks are detrimental to the growth of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) But if we see the history of FOSS, both flame wars and forks have played a crucial role in determining both growth and direction of important projects. There are also arguments that this leads to fragmentation and marginalization. There is some truth in these arguments but there are a lot of benefits which are often overlooked. This article looks at some of the benefits of forking and flame wars through history."
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Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom More

Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom

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  • It's like capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:16PM (#11469959)
    Differing ideas compete, and the strong ones survive. Forks are just a different way of getting there.
    • But it's unlike modern capitalism, where you use patents and copyrights to hold on to your "intellectual property". According to Bill Gates, we're all some kind of communists.
      • Patents and copyrights are designated to prevent certain kinds of competition, not encourage it. They only work as promoters of competition, in the larger scale, if they're carefully crafted and monitored -- which is certainly not the case right now.

        In the current run-amok situation, with patents and copyrights is probably producing something much closer to a centraly-organized communist system than anything that the FOSS community can generate. (i.e. only members of the central elite will be allowed to

    • Differing ideas compete, and the strong ones survive. Forks are just a different way of getting there.

      Yes and no. There are fewer external factors in most FOSS projects that will kill it (like making money) - basically, as long as the developers are having a good time, projects continue to exist. It also means ego is more of a component, relatively, since profit doesn't play. As such, it's much more likely that a viable product will fork over personal difference, which in the corporate world is rare.

      T

    • Differing ideas compete, and the strong ones survive. Forks are just a different way of getting there.

      You expect us to believe that critical peer review produces good solutions?! Come on!
    • Unfortunately this leads to a lot of wasted and duplicated effort. EG: Gnome vs KDE. IIRC, Gnome got started because some GPL bigots got their panties in a bunch because the Qt license wasn't GPL-compatable. This is a pretty pointless pissing match that doesn't have any benefit to anyone, because the two projects have nearly 100% overlap.

      Compare this to the OpenBSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD fork. Each of the forks has a very different design goal: OpenBSD concentrates on security, NetBSD goes for maximum cross-p

      • Positive changes happened to KDE and QT's licensing because of that fork. If GNOME hadn't come along, KDE would probably still be technically illegal to distribute to this day. This isn't how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-pin. As FOSS grows in use and acceptance, the amount of money flowing around grows as well. This inevitably leads to toes stepped on and in our unenlightened society THAT leads to lawyers flinging monkey poo. Like it or not, "What are the legal risks?" are questions FOSS distri
    • What does this have to do with capitalism? In primitive communist societies, the strong ideas of making fire and the wheel survived, roads and aqueducts from the Roman slave system, and gunpowder during the feudal system. A better mousetrap (or weapon) benefited the lords, slave owners, and tribes of days past. The USSR invented and improved it's production conditions throughout the 1930s (when the US and European economies were virtually dead), and launched the first satellite in the 1950s. And most of

  • bah (Score:5, Funny)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld.gmail@com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:16PM (#11469960) Homepage
    This story is just STUPID!! That's it, I'm starting my own slashdot!

  • Flamebait +1 (Score:2, Funny)

    by fembots ( 753724 )
    So Flamebait gets karma point now?

  • All-in-one-page version.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <tom@th[ ]sleecopeland.com ['oma' in gap]> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:18PM (#11469985) Homepage
    ...is here [osnews.com].

    Nice history lesson on EGCS. I wondered how that got sorted out...

  • Well, wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:20PM (#11470027)
    > There are also arguments that this leads to fragmentation and marginalization. There is some truth in these arguments but there are a lot of benefits which are often overlooked.

    Well, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON, bud? Huh?

    You can't post a juicy title like "Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom" without taking a side.

    What are you, some kind of GNU/Commie? ESR-Capitalist? Microsoft Nazi? (Or a paid OS X shill?)

    And if you're just trying to present both sides of the argument in a fair and balanced fashion (sorry, I know a friend who worked at FOX, but since his facts are licensed FreeBSD-style, it's OK if I use them on Slashdot), then what are you doing whining about it on Slashdot? For chrissakes, man, just do a CVS branch and start coding your own facts, dammit!

  • Like the "Linux is Obsolete" flame war of 1992? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theluckyleper ( 758120 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:20PM (#11470028) Homepage
    Preserved by Google:

    Famous debate between Andy Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds [google.com]

    What OS would I be running now if Linus had just given up and said, "You're right"?

    • Re:Like the "Linux is Obsolete" flame war of 1992? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, had that flame war never happened, nothing would have changed. As it stands, the only real effect of it was to put egg on Andy's face.

      I think the real reason it's famous is that it's a professor criticizing a student, and the student ultimately was proven right to an extent. A lot of geeks feel this way about their teachers (often rightly so).

    • What OS would I be running now if Linus had just given up and said, "You're right"?

      A good one (for my values of good =)

    • I've never read the text of that before, but I've heard about it. Now that I read through it, I'm surprised at how immature "Linus Benedict Torvalds" was when he wrote those. While he makes valid arguments and strong points throughout, he can't refrain from name-calling and insults.

      Has this impacted the success of Linux? If you go into a business meeting, interview, etc., and communicate in the way that I see on that thread, you won't go far. Good geeks don't always make good businesspeople.

      Just an observ

    • Andy's Current Take (Score:5, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:47PM (#11470410) Homepage Journal
      I figured I'd see why Andy's current take on Linux is. From his FAQ:
      What do you think of Linux?

      I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.
      I was most surprised by the number 40,000. It cetainly seems Linus was the right man in the right place at the right time - linux was just begging to happen!
    • Today this is an amazingly interesting read, and probably a good reminder of why you should trust your professors to teach you some techinal things, but leave the practical decisions to people who actually "do" things.

      A choice quote, referring to the 80386: "I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long."

      True in theory, but practice has a nasty habit of wrecking theories. That said, his concerns about portability turned out
      • A choice quote, referring to the 80386: "I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long." [...] concerns about portability turned out to be unfounded as well.

        That's because, in my feeble understanding of the Linux architecture, it wasn't actually designed for the 80386. The 80386 has a pretty unique paged-segmentation architecture, which means that addresses are organized first by arbitrary-size (up to 32-bit) segments which t

    • BSD (Score:2)

      by 3770 ( 560838 )
      BSD!
    • Maybe a better one?

      Don't get me wrong, I like linux, and I sure as hell couldn't write it myself - yet, anyway. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like the amature kludge it originally was. And although I admire how well he's led it, some of Linus' design decisions have been decidedly odd, and, well, wrong. It works - but I can't help feeling it would work better if a bit more experience had gone into the overall design.

      • This is one of the reasons I switched to FreeBSD. For every questionable design decision there is an academic paper written by the author defending the decision. I may still disagree with the decision, but at least this way I can understand the thinking behind it. Some of the Linux code I've looked at seems to owe more to UCB's other contribution - LSD.
        • OF course FreeBSD's latest design is controversial and has some issues. Matt Dillion left as a result and the the other top two developers left during the past several years. I find it doing strange things with my boxes and my USB keyboard wont work with the latest 5.x releases.

          I am looking at NetBSD right now.

          I am a former FreeBSD user and agree with what you are saying. Linux use to be trim and stable during the 2.0 days. But now, I find the userland programs less tested and more buggy than the BSD vers

  • Say what now? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:21PM (#11470042)

    In the news media, it is generally shown that flame wars and forks are detrimental to the growth of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software)

    No, it's claimed that flame wars and forks are detrimental. To show that something is detrimental would involve coming up with a bit of evidence.

  • Flame Wars through history (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:21PM (#11470049) Homepage Journal
    This article looks at some of the benefits of forking and flame wars through history.
    Hey! Who remembers that crazy flame fest between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Man, those guys were really wailing at each other on IRC. Lenin called Martov a lam3r, and then Kollontai said he was like totally quitting cos no-one respected his L33T SKILLZ!

    Crazy.

    Oh, wait, you meant "in the last ten years". My bad.

  • I think I speak for all of us when I say... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by testing124 ( 772675 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:22PM (#11470056)
    Goodbye, XFree86.
    • I'm a Debian user, you insensitive clod!

      • No kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by phorm ( 591458 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @01:19PM (#11470839) Journal
        Even in debian/unstable, we're still stuck without x.org - doesn't make a lot of sense to me as many other packages are generally up-to-the-day updated (most that I use seem to be within the week).

        But still, we're stuck with Xfree4.3 ...
        I use to have an unofficial deb site which offered x.org, but that one died sometime ago as well... so I've been without x.org updates for awhile. I suppose one could use alien to debianize a bunch of RPM's but what a royal pain in the butt.


        Come on debian package admins, the people want X.org!

        • Re:No kidding! (Score:2, Informative)

          by GtKincaid ( 820642 )
          Just to point out that ubuntu horay has an x.org port which you could use , so if anyone who uses debian has a problem with the xfree politics its possible to switch.
          deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hoary main
          iirc thats the repository
          to stay on topic for a while , Forks ussualy cause problems but in this bussiness Egos are going to emerge . Creative people have Egos and Egos can destroy projects , a good project leader knows how to stroke the conflicting egos properly to keep us all in line
        • I asked someone about this who tends to keep in the loop of this type of thing. He said that there was a planned restructure of the X.Org code, to make it a lot nicer, and Debian is waiting for that to be done before they make X.Org packages. If they do it beforehand, then when the X.Org change is done, the Debian crew will have to redo a whole lot of work.

  • Analogy Police (Score:5, Funny)

    by BabyDave ( 575083 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:22PM (#11470058)

    Forks spur competition. It is a bit like evolution. In nature, a new species survives if the differentiation from the dominant group gives it an advantage for survival in a hostile world. That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.

    So they're saying we should drop an asteroid on the XFree86 developers?

    • That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.

      So they're saying we should drop an asteroid on the XFree86 developers?

      Heh. The analogy gets even worse when you consider that at least 6 dinosaur species survived, and they've expanded to about 8000 species now, about twice the number of mammal species. Of course, the dinosaur survivors were the critters we now call "birds", and they were the small, opportunistic "generalist" kind that you'd expect, as were the surviving mammals.

      So if yo

  • We need a way to score articles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:23PM (#11470066) Homepage
    So we can vote articles like this one:

    Argument leads to better ideas.

    Obvious -1

  • Forks == the power of Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:23PM (#11470072)
    The Single Biggest Advantage of Open Source software is that when the company/individual/team/whatever who is developing it no longer supports it well, it can be forked (FreeX86, and Blender are good examples).

    With proprietary software, even if your vendor is successful (Peoplesoft) you're likely to be trapped in a sucky end-of-life situation.

    If your vendor isn't successful, the software just vanishes.

    Forks protect against both of these.

  • "As long as they are done for the valid reasons and not due to political or personal reasons, they will thrive."

    Heh, what about Theo's fork from NetBSD to create OpenBSD?
    • Political or personal reasons are often perfectly valid reasons to fork. OSS developers are as human as anyone else, and there are (often) personality clashes and conflicts. If you're too annoying to work with, don't be suprised if either the project forks out from under you, or if you you end up forking away your own project.

  • Flamewars&Forks=FOSS Version of Commercial Mar (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Flamewars and forks to generate variations of a particular piece of GPLed software is the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) version of a commercial market. In the commercial market (a.k.a. "THE" free market), when a product does not sell, it loses money, and the corporation stops developing it. Another corporation may have the vision for a better variation of said product, and that corporation will build it.

    In the FOSS market, flamewars and forks generate different variations from a current path of devel

  • Forks = new ideas = good thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tekiegreg ( 674773 ) * <tekieg1-slashdot@yahoo.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:27PM (#11470117) Homepage Journal
    Forks also = shared devlopment time = apps that support one fork but not other = fragmentation = bad thing. This is one of the advantages and one of the problems of Open source vs. closed source. Consequently Windows has a benefit here. Say what you will but the windows development base is fairly unified and a concentration of efforts is easier; though admittedly less innovative than Linux granted forking produces new ideas. Not meant to be Linux bashing in favor of windows but this goes to show how windows isn't dying any time soon...
    • Sucessfull OSS projects almost always either a) make a point of remaining compatible, so at the very least you can do side-by-side installations or b) outcompete all competition so the losing forks become marginalized and eventually ignored. This is very similiar to how the real software market works, by the way. You're comparing one successfull product ("Windows") to a whole market ("OSS"). It's more accurate to look at OSS as a model of what the commercial software industry should look like. Think about

  • Motivation is key to successful forking (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:28PM (#11470133) Homepage
    When forks are brought about by personality conflicts and useless cruft, they're destined for failure... when they're brought about because something is impeding the progress of a motivated group of coders, they succeed.

    That said, I think this article certainly was rather meaningless, and not really "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."

  • The XEmacs/GNU Emacs fork (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:30PM (#11470159) Homepage Journal
    The Emacs/XEmacs fork is given passing mention in the article, but is actually one of the more interesting ones. At the time XEmacs really did represent a step forward, mostly in its embrace of an X based GUI using modern toolkits. Consequently XEmacs tended to romp along and be the feature leader. Most recently, however, the situation has reversed. It is now XEmacs that is unwilling to use modern toolkits, and GNU Emacs is starting to push back.

    Let's be frank, these days when we say "modern GUI toolkit" for X we mean wither GTK or QT. XEmacs does have GTK support, but the developers are not interested in it, and mostly it is just slow, and bug ridden, even in CVS. Compare that to Emacs, which has finally decided that GTK might not be such a bad idea. The current CVS versions of Emacs have excellent GTK support, making full use of the latest versions of GTK. It looks and behaves very nicely indeed, and integrates quite well into a GNOME desktop. The new GNU Emacs will also sport excellent Unicode support. It will be interesting to see how the GNU Emacs/XEmacs debate stands once XEmacs 22 and Emacs 22 come out. I expect to see GNU Emacs get a real boost in popularity.

    Jedidiah.
    • The Emacs/XEmacs fork is given passing mention in the article, but is actually one of the more interesting ones. At the time XEmacs really did represent a step forward

      GNU Emacs would have represented an even bigger step forward had the XEmacs developers not gone it alone. The Emacs developers had come up with an elegant design for Emacs that would work on both X and a TTY terminal. The commercial company that was pushing for X support decided that this ambitious project was going to take too long and went

      • MULE was actually merged into XEmacs long before Emacs. But in XEmacs it was a compile time option, where in Emacs it was forced upon all users. Both places, MULE was rather buggy. In XEmacs it ment that sers just disabled it. For Emacs, it ment that users either refused to upgrade, fleed to XEmacs, or fixed the bugs. Anough choose the later that the result is that Emacs today have much better working Mule code than XEmacs.
      • XEmacs had color support for tty's first.

        Emacs *should* make gtk integration a priority, since gtk is the toolkit of Gnome, which is the official GNU desktop. It is embarrasing that the flagship GNU application (Eamcs) does not integrate smoothly into the GNU desktop.

        Today both XEmacs has Emacs have big problems with their release process, the last feature release of GNU Emacs is three year old, and the XEmacs situation is confusing. Lots of cool stuff is in CVS in both projects, getting nowhere.

    • i don't think the word "debate" applies these days, but anyway...

      xemacs folks basically said "we don't like lawyers; we don't need to talk to them" whereas (that most hoary programmer ;-) rms knew to stop w/ the first clause and furthermore acted to overcome his dislike to secure top-flight legal advice. the result is a situation that is fundamentally (at the foundation at the base, upon which all other problems and/or solutions must rest) irreconcilable.

      in a world where the big nasties are just wai

    • The current CVS versions of Emacs have excellent GTK support, making full use of the latest versions of GTK. It looks and behaves very nicely indeed, and integrates quite well into a GNOME desktop.

      I just would like xemacs to support gnome-session. I don't want to have to use vector fonts in xemacs. I like my bitmaped -misc-fixed-*-*-semicondensed-*-*-120-*-*-c-*-iso 8 859-15. It's the perfect size to allow three 80 col windows to be placed side by side in 1600x1200 resolution. All my vector fonts seem

  • Fork (Score:2, Funny)

    by skraps ( 650379 )
    I hate this no good article!
    All the slashdot editors are big dummies!!
    I'm gonna start my own slashdot!

  • Huh. (Score:3, Informative)

    by shrykk ( 747039 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:36PM (#11470254)
    This article is awful. Surely every slashdot reader knows about all the events in TFA, and the author doesn't make any new points.

    Of course, ability to fork is a vital part of software freedom, but in a world of scarce developer time, it is vital not to let politics and personalities interfere with development of the best software.
    • Of course, ability to fork is a vital part of software freedom, but in a world of scarce developer time, it is vital not to let politics and personalities interfere with development of the best software.

      My time may be scarce, but I am the one who gets to choose where it is spent. If you don't like it, for enough of your cash I might be persuaded to change my mind. But until I see the contents of your wallet I'm coding on what *I* want to code.

      Frankly, I'm getting tired of whiny users arguing that politic
      • My time may be scarce, but I am the one who gets to choose where it is spent.

        Brandybuck, I salute you for your contribution to open source and home brewing :)

        The point is was trying to make was more like, if you want to contribute to an open-source project, you shouldn't have to fork it because the current maintainers are dicks.

  • Forks are like branch prediction. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CustomDesigned ( 250089 ) <stuart@gathman.org> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:44PM (#11470358) Homepage Journal
    High performance processors read ahead in the instruction stream, so that multiple instructions can be processed simultaneously. When such a processor encounters a branch, and the branch condition is not yet known, what does it do?

    Some designs guess which way the branch will go, and continue accordingly. When the branch condition becomes known, and it guessed wrong, it throws away all the work on that branch and starts over causing a pipeline stall. Often, extra bits are available in the branch instruction to provide hints on which branch decision is more likely. The processor may even keep stats on hot branches in a branch prediction cache.

    Other designs work on both forks of a branch simultaneously. When the branch condition becomes known, the execution tree is pruned. A fork in an open source project effectively pursues both branches simultaneously. One difference is that while often one branch is discarded (e.g. what will probably happen with the XFree86 fork), but sometimes both become viable options (e.g. Gnome and KDE).

  • OSS vs Human analogy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Deanalator ( 806515 ) <pierce403@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @12:45PM (#11470385) Homepage
    fork = genetic diversity
    flame war = territorial battles

    The point is that both of these are needed in a progressive system. For a proper society to move forward, people's feelings need to get hurt here and there. People need to be able to go off and explore new ideas on their own, and I think thats the whole point of OSS, as opposed to a company which classically has very strict production goals.
    • And when two camps won't cooperate and interbreed, eventually genetic differnces between the populations cause speciation.

      That's the clicncher to your biological comparison.
      • Except that the biological analogy falls down when you realize that code branches can "interbreed" no matter how far they've evolved. Biological species generally can't do this, if they're much more complex than bacteria.

        I'm involved in one of several branches of a program (which one isn't material here) that happened simply because different groups of users needed different features added. Most groups didn't see any need for the others' extensions, so we couldn't get everyone working on a single branch.

  • FOSS, Co-ops and Syndicalism (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shannon Love ( 705240 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @01:08PM (#11470698) Homepage
    One of the more interesting questions in economics is why decentralized forms of economic management like cooperatives or the old Syndicalist ideas never become widespread.

    It would seem at first that an employee owned and managed business would easily out compete more proprietary ones. For example, employee owned businesses don't have to fire people when times get thin. Everybody just takes a pay cut and keeps working. The co-op can maintain the same output as before at a lower price.

    Yet employee owned firms are very rare despite numerous attempts to create them over many years and in many different legal and economic environments. Studies have shown that such forms of organization fail due to phenomenon which we would call flamewars and forking. In short, politics either paralyzes the firm or causes factions to leave.

    FOSS succeeds to the degree it does largely due the non-zero sum nature of its products. Forking causes only a dilution of developer time not the division of physical assets. Even so, excessive forking kills products. FOSS can stave off, but not eliminate, the inherent threats poised by decentralized management.

    There is some tip point where creative give-and-take gives way to flamewars and where forking leads not to greater diversity and innovation but to a fatal dilution of effort and brand.

    Might be a PH.d thesis in that for somebody
  • The Source Tree must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Forkers and Flamers.
  • Flame Wars
    More often than not flame wars are precursor to forks

    Right. That's why emacs forked from vi. I see that now.
    • vi won that war the day emacs included a vi mode. :)
      • Maybe, but look at how many vi clones we now have.

        Funny thing is, I don't remember ever reading about the reasons for all these clones. In my experience, they all seem to be quite usable, though sometimes I'm surprised by their small differences. Most often, I'm just disappointed by a vi that can't undo more than one change.

        (And the main reason for wanting that is that one of our cute little cockatiels just ran across the keyboard. Oh, the perils of working from home ... ;-)
  • History is nothing more than the recounting of wars, and it is written by the victors.

  • The jargon file defines flaming as, "To post an email message intended to insult and provoke." The high profile disputes the article discusses don't really have that the element of pettiness and spite that is the hallmark of fine flaming.

  • Methinks someone used too much Powerpoint (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Alzheimers ( 467217 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @01:35PM (#11471051)
    -I think that the author has been using too much PowerPoint

    -There are alot of good examples presented

    -However, the tendency to make everything a bulletpoint, a la Powerpoint, can be overwhelming

    -Case in point, Page 1

    -Are you still reading this?

    -This bullet is important, but I chose to put it down here because it doesn't seem "sexy" enough.

    -At least he didn't choose an obnoxious background

    -CONCLUSION: the author been using too much PowerPoint.

  • evolution (Score:2, Insightful)

    by x40sw0n ( 830531 )
    is it any suprise that software developement is starting to closely mimic nature? that parallel development leads to specializiation and survivalism? Weaker products either find a survival niche (something that they are really good at, akin to giraffes) or become overall a stronger competitor than everything else, not neccessarily the strongest, fastest, or anything but the most flexible (Linux is, Windows trys, kind of like the early stages of human development). Remember, there were two branches of develo
  • Open source projects are community affairs. When the community leaders become unresponsive to the community, a fork can become the only way to save the software, and thereby the community. Forks are competition - if the new fork is more popular, it can overcome the parent fork in the market - and outweigh the market confusion between the different, and potentially incomaptible versions.

  • WOW! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bman08 ( 239376 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @02:16PM (#11471581)
    Everybody is repeating the same nugget of obvious information that the article was based on. A piece of information that everybody here knows. This is a nothing conversation about the painfully obvious that's not going anywhere fast.
  • Although the article lightly touches on OpenBSD in reference, I'm surprised an article that concentrates so much on flame wars and distribution forkings would omit talking about the origins of OpenBSD altogether. Though the details are sketchy to me after all these years, I remember distinctly Theo was a core NetBSD developer who's vitriolic and (at least I thought) humorous flames against people in the USENET community caused him to be ejected as a core developer, it was at least one major step that turne
  • Forks spur competition. It is a bit like evolution. In nature, a new species survives if the differentiation from the dominant group gives it an advantage for survival in a hostile world. That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.

    1) The dinosaurs dominated the large animal niches for far longer than mammals have. It is a few hundred million years too early to start gloating.

    2) The dinosaurs did survive - I can see their ancestors swimming around in the duckpond outside my window.

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