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10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened
- pgebhard 18y agoPretty good choices for the list. A bit of history and details, but only very little analysis of why they forked.
- jmtulloss 18y agoEh, made for an easy read. I'm ok with it.
- ivey 18y agoBest line in the article, re: Carrier forking from Pidgin: "A fork (initially called Funpidgin) was done of Pidgin 2.4.0 because there were disagreements about the size of the text entry field."
- benbeltran 18y agoSometimes developers can be very childish and proud. Just make the damn thing resizable or write a plugin or something.
- Dobbs 18y agoI was listening to (I believe it was) Mark Shuttleworth the other week and he basically stated that: "All forks are generally a result of lack of good communication between developers." From what I have seen Pidgin developers are morose than normal. This clashed when they refused absolutely to listen to users who wanted at most an option to disable this effect from the options menu. In the end this isn't about a text entry field its about developers who will listen and act on user input.
- jwilliams 18y agoIndeed. I think this is a nice article - but it can be summed up by: why do (open source) project fork? For lots and lots of reasons. I guess the lesson is, if you're heavily invested in an open source project, you might want to think about how you'd deal with a (perhaps inevitable) fork.
- pierrefar 18y agoWhy not link to the projects being discussed. That's a lame oversight.
- andyking 18y agoI'll tell you what's interesting. This blog. It's from a fairly unsexy uptime monitoring company, whose services I've got little interest in. If the blog was just company updates ("we've got a new server" or "20% off all packages this week") it'd get very little traffic. But I've got it in my RSS reader and it hits the social news sites every other day with well-written and often humorous observations on tech. Lots of people have heard of Pingdom who ordinarily wouldn't; it just goes to show how a little effort making your website something more than just a corporate website can go a long way.
- pfedor 18y agoOne interesting fork was egcs, forked from gcc in the 1990s, by people who wanted to try out the "bazaar" development model (as opposed to the "cathedral" model the FSF used, which meant very little engaging of the community.) The experiment turned out very successful and eventually the egcs version was named the one and true gcc (and the gcc we use today is a derivative of it.)
- jacobscott 18y agoThis article is interesting, but I think it is too shallow to get any deep understanding of causes of forking as a phenomenon. A case study on /that/ would be kick ass, and quite a treat in terms of both software engineering methodology and oss anthropology.
- gaius 18y agoFor example, it doesn't even mention that OpenBSD's priority is security and NetBSD's is portability, and that that is the reason for the fork.