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Forking is healthy. In the late 90s/early 00s, you'd hear about a new Linux fork almost every other month. Those forks would die quickly, but sometimes would ha
by debacle 12y ago
Forking is healthy. In the late 90s/early 00s, you'd hear about a new Linux fork almost every other month. Those forks would die quickly, but sometimes would have something to contribute back to the larger distros.
The fact that Node is popular enough to fork is a good thing. There is an inherent disagreement between Joylent and the Io.js folks, not on technology but process, and it's likely that the conflict will be resolved that way they always are (the more suited fork will win out). The risk of fragmentation is very low.
- pjc50 12y agoThere were some notable fork successes which overtook the original; egcs is the one that comes to mind. There's still a huge variety of distros, mostly RPM-based. And the three BSDs. And Lucid/Xemacs.
- pekk 12y agoTo clarify, Xemacs is a fork, but almost nobody uses Xemacs any more.
- andyidsinga 12y agoYUP! -- when I heard it got forked my first reaction was "great, good luck to them, I'll continue to use node, imagine moving to Go and maybe in a year I'll hear about iojs if it goes anywhere" Cheers to the iojs guys. (ps. I have to admit, I hope to see more blog posts on these subjects creatively include "motherforker" in their titles)
- wesleyfsmith 12y agoI think the linux comparison is quite apt. Even now, there are multiple distros that all use the same package format, deb or rpm. They are different forks of linux, but they've made a point to still have interoperable packages with one another.