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Serious question: in the past 10 or so years, have their been any successful community-driven forks/projects? Many (most?) of the successful ones are driven by

Serious question: in the past 10 or so years, have their been any successful community-driven forks/projects? Many (most?) of the successful ones are driven by muti-billion/multi-million dollar companies. Some of the "leftovers" from previous eras are more often than not also driven by these companies (just look at contributions to Linux for example).

the-dude 5y ago
X.org?
djur 5y ago
Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson. I think it's fair to say that most large-scale community-managed projects are also going to have at least some kind of nonprofit attached, which will probably receive funding from companies which have an interest in keeping things going. For instance, Blender was a commercial and proprietary product that was made open source through a crowdfunded campaign run by a nonprofit created by Blender's original author. The Blender Foundation receives corporate funding and is a major contributor to development, but I think it's also fair to describe it as a successful community-driven project. Honestly, if something is high-profile enough to be identified as "successful" that probably means that someone's getting paid to work on it, and that money is probably coming from a commercial donor on some level or another. The one exception might be in video games: open source releases of games (such as The Ur-Quan Masters) are usually 100% volunteer-driven and are unlikely to receive corporate funding. Some of those have been very successful!
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson. Five top contributors to Jenkins are from Cloudbees. $100 million annual recurring revenue [1] Then there's one from Apache. One from RedHat. And even beyond top five contributions are meager to say the least. While opensource, development is driven by the company that builds a product on top of it. > Honestly, if something is high-profile enough to be identified as "successful" that probably means that someone's getting paid to work on it, and that money is probably coming from a commercial donor on some level or another. That was more-or-less a subtext to my question: to work on something big, you probably need full-time engineers. And those engineers at the very least need to eat something :) [1] https://thestack.technology/cloudbees-new-ceo/ https://thestack.technology/cloudbees-new-ceo/
  - djur 5y ago
    I think having commercial users of software fund ongoing development is a good thing and does not inherently mean that the project is no longer "community-driven". Commercial users are part of the community.
neandrake 5y ago
In this situation the original project is no longer receiving regular updates. The fork is intended to continue maintaining the project, like updating to newer versions of PHP as older ones EOL, in addition to some new feature development.
merb 5y ago
servo
cat199 5y ago
not sure if exactly 10 years, but all are still used: * mambo & joomla (maybe that's more like 15) * owncloud / nextcloud * mariadb / mysql and not all are necissarily 'community driven' in the sense of no $$ involved, but the community split/forked trying to maintain some level of increased openness, and the resulting fork is still viable
bawolff 5y ago
A fork is like a revolution - its kind of a last resort thing. However the threat of it is important check on the power maintainers have.
pabs3 5y ago
LibreOffice

the-dude 5y ago

X.org?

djur 5y ago

Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson. I think it's fair to say that most large-scale community-managed projects are also going to have at least some kind of nonprofit attached, which will probably receive funding from companies which have an interest in keeping things going. For instance, Blender was a commercial and proprietary product that was made open source through a crowdfunded campaign run by a nonprofit created by Blender's original author. The Blender Foundation receives corporate funding and is a major contributor to development, but I think it's also fair to describe it as a successful community-driven project. Honestly, if something is high-profile enough to be identified as "successful" that probably means that someone's getting paid to work on it, and that money is probably coming from a commercial donor on some level or another. The one exception might be in video games: open source releases of games (such as The Ur-Quan Masters) are usually 100% volunteer-driven and are unlikely to receive corporate funding. Some of those have been very successful!

dmitriid 5y ago
> Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson. Five top contributors to Jenkins are from Cloudbees. $100 million annual recurring revenue [1] Then there's one from Apache. One from RedHat. And even beyond top five contributions are meager to say the least. While opensource, development is driven by the company that builds a product on top of it. > Honestly, if something is high-profile enough to be identified as "successful" that probably means that someone's getting paid to work on it, and that money is probably coming from a commercial donor on some level or another. That was more-or-less a subtext to my question: to work on something big, you probably need full-time engineers. And those engineers at the very least need to eat something :) [1] https://thestack.technology/cloudbees-new-ceo/ https://thestack.technology/cloudbees-new-ceo/
- djur 5y ago
  I think having commercial users of software fund ongoing development is a good thing and does not inherently mean that the project is no longer "community-driven". Commercial users are part of the community.

neandrake 5y ago

In this situation the original project is no longer receiving regular updates. The fork is intended to continue maintaining the project, like updating to newer versions of PHP as older ones EOL, in addition to some new feature development.

merb 5y ago

servo

cat199 5y ago

not sure if exactly 10 years, but all are still used: * mambo & joomla (maybe that's more like 15) * owncloud / nextcloud * mariadb / mysql and not all are necissarily 'community driven' in the sense of no $$ involved, but the community split/forked trying to maintain some level of increased openness, and the resulting fork is still viable

bawolff 5y ago

A fork is like a revolution - its kind of a last resort thing. However the threat of it is important check on the power maintainers have.

pabs3 5y ago

LibreOffice