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> It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car. It's a great analogy: just look at the Mac repair
by ben509 8y ago
> It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car.
It's a great analogy: just look at the Mac repair shops being sued by Apple, or the idiotic things printer manufacturers and even coffee pod makers do to prevent people from "pirating" their machines.
Free software, and arguably free markets, mean free secondary markets for used goods. That includes all the repair shops and a cottage industry of craftsmen who provide those goods and services.
- gitgud 8y agoFree secondary markets is a great analogy for open source. What comes to mind is forks and plugins of open source projects, I guess they are a secondary market for the main project.
- AstralStorm 8y agoFull forks are very rare. I could count important ones on my fingers. GNOME forks Cinnamon and Mate (active), libav vs ffmpeg (now closing), mplayer/2/mpv (mostly overtaken by last one). Most common pattern is multiple packages solving the same problem, rather than forks - and incompatible versions.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoLibreOffice? MariaDB? Ubuntu?
- syshum 8y agoI would not call Ubuntu a Fork... The rest are good examples but of the millions of projects very very few are forked successfully I could add a couple to this list as well but that does not change the fact that successful forks are exceeding rare
- AstralStorm 8y agoMariaDB and LibreOffice were forked for license reasons - the fork was not avoidable. They also took over original code development.