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If the project leads can agree to a shared vision - which frankly should be similar considering the scope of the projects - it's most likely better if they merg

by oblio 3y ago

If the project leads can agree to a shared vision - which frankly should be similar considering the scope of the projects - it's most likely better if they merge. Open Source projects never have enough resources and splitting them into 2 clone projects is generally not great. I know about competition but it's not like Vim/Neovim, programming text editor, is lacking in competition even without the other side of the fork :-)

tokai 3y ago
>better if they merge You and meitham are very focused on this, but it is very much an opinion and not a fact.
- nicce 3y ago
  It depends on the differences of their goals and principles. It is fact that 1 + 1 > 1 if you compare available resources.
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    Vim was developed by Bram commiting and controlling every change. Neovim very much already unlocked a greater than one situation by adopting a different development model.
- oblio 3y ago
  It is an opinion backed by watching Open Source projects for several decades. Long lived forks are rarely good for an individual project. Frankly, the most successful forks I've seen unfortunately... kind of strangle off the original. Jenkins/Huson, LibreOffice/OpenOffice, MariaDB/MySQL, ConsoleZ/Console2/... Though there are cases where the original wins out: Emacs/XEmacs, etc. Especially since it's not like Vim/Neovim are already lacking in features to implement, bugs to fix, ways to extend their architectures :-)
  - tokai 3y ago
    Eh I'm not going to go through your list, but putting libre/open office on there is disingenuous. Open office was run into the ground by Oracle, not because of the forking.
    - bhaak 3y ago
      Couldn't you say the same about Hudson and MySQL?
  - roblabla 3y ago
    The first three all have the same story though, where Oracle acquired the project, forced changes that drove the original authors out, who then forked the project and resumed development there. So Hudson/OpenOfice/MySQL essentially lost the key developers that had all the institutional knowledge, killing them. I do think there would be a lot to gain to merge vim/neovim, but they're in a very different position. I don't know enough about the other two forks to draw parallels to them.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
      > killing them MySQL 8 was released nine years after the split, and was one of the best releases throughout the project's history (cleaning up many decades old problems, modernizing the underlying storage engine, introducing window functions, CTEs, transactional DDL, lots of other stuff like that).
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    LibreOffice is the mainline, not a fork in anything but the name.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    There are also cases where the fork is caused by differences in philosophy and result in divergent codebases that are perfectly fine doing their own things, like NetBSD and OpenBSD.
  - hnfong 3y ago

by oblio 3y ago

tokai 3y ago

>better if they merge You and meitham are very focused on this, but it is very much an opinion and not a fact.

nicce 3y ago
It depends on the differences of their goals and principles. It is fact that 1 + 1 > 1 if you compare available resources.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Vim was developed by Bram commiting and controlling every change. Neovim very much already unlocked a greater than one situation by adopting a different development model.
oblio 3y ago
It is an opinion backed by watching Open Source projects for several decades. Long lived forks are rarely good for an individual project. Frankly, the most successful forks I've seen unfortunately... kind of strangle off the original. Jenkins/Huson, LibreOffice/OpenOffice, MariaDB/MySQL, ConsoleZ/Console2/... Though there are cases where the original wins out: Emacs/XEmacs, etc. Especially since it's not like Vim/Neovim are already lacking in features to implement, bugs to fix, ways to extend their architectures :-)
- tokai 3y ago
  Eh I'm not going to go through your list, but putting libre/open office on there is disingenuous. Open office was run into the ground by Oracle, not because of the forking.
  - bhaak 3y ago
    Couldn't you say the same about Hudson and MySQL?
- roblabla 3y ago
  The first three all have the same story though, where Oracle acquired the project, forced changes that drove the original authors out, who then forked the project and resumed development there. So Hudson/OpenOfice/MySQL essentially lost the key developers that had all the institutional knowledge, killing them. I do think there would be a lot to gain to merge vim/neovim, but they're in a very different position. I don't know enough about the other two forks to draw parallels to them.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    > killing them MySQL 8 was released nine years after the split, and was one of the best releases throughout the project's history (cleaning up many decades old problems, modernizing the underlying storage engine, introducing window functions, CTEs, transactional DDL, lots of other stuff like that).
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  LibreOffice is the mainline, not a fork in anything but the name.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  There are also cases where the fork is caused by differences in philosophy and result in divergent codebases that are perfectly fine doing their own things, like NetBSD and OpenBSD.
- hnfong 3y ago