[OSM-talk] [talk-au] Fwd: Re: Why PD is not better for business

[Emilie Laffray]

2009/12/11 Peter Childs <pchilds at bcs.org>

>
> Hmm Maybe these have not all died but the split did cause serious damage.
>
> X (You now have a choice of X.org and XFree86), The split caused a
> long halt in development and the original is hardly used now, only the
> branch....
>
> Joomla/Mambo
>
> I'm sure there are others
>
>
Hum, the examples you are choosing are interesting but not for the reason
you think. Please note that I am not advocating a fork far from it.
In the two cases you cited, the fork is actually very strong, and there was
very little damage.
For X.org, I don't see where there was an halt in development. The first
X.Org release came shortly after the split. In addition, a lot of people
would tell you that the split happened because partly the development was
getting nowhere, due the number of contributors being restricted to only a
few people who didn't want to see much change. The license was just the
extra thing that made the community fork the code.
For Joomla/Mambo, you can see that Joomla never really stopped. Mambo was
commercial and was ignoring the community, but most of the main devs were
the one who actually forked the code. The main reason for the fork was a
foundation take over.
I would say that in both case the fork was a good thing.

If you want an interesting example, you can always the case of Compiz, which
had been forked and then remerged.
I don't think we are near any of those scenarios for plenty of reasons, like
the nature of the licence, the political situation, etc..... I don't see the
reason to propagate more fear than is actually needed. It is clear that if a
fork happens either one of the branch dies (not necessarily the main one),
or it will merge back later on at some point. There is always a cost to pay
when you are forking but the effects are very hard to predict. You always
have to wonder what the exact cost of forking, taking time to carefully
evaluate why you want to fork or is it worth it in the first place? Can you
talk about the subject, come to a compromise and so far? I haven't seen the
foundation so far not trying to explain itself, and trying to move towards a
compromise.

Emilie Laffray
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