Interbase Fork Imminent?

A reader wrote to us saying: "Technocrat.net has this story about how Inprise is pissing off the developers and users of Interbase, who were creating a vibrant community around the open source RDBMS. As a result, It looks as like the project is about to fork, and the independent branch will be called Firebird."

Comments

Re:The irony here is almost unbearable

[David Greene]

Actually, forking can be extremely useful in some cases. Probably the best example is the gcc/egcs split that happened some years ago.

At the time, the gcc maintainer was sitting on an enormous number of patches, mostly contributed by Cygnus. These patches fixed critical problems with g++. Things were so bad at one point that the Cygnus version of g++ was the only version of gcc that could compile my code.

Several people brought this up on USENET. Some time later, the EGCS project was announced. The Cygnus compiler was quickly released more visibly (it had of course always been availble on their FTP site). Development was changed to a bazaar style and improvements quickly rolled in.

About two years later, the FSF finally caught up and decided to roll in the EGCS changes, creating gcc 2.95. Both projects happily merged and all is well in compiler-land.

Forking is probably the most powerful tool we have in the Free Software community. It's akin to booting our elected officials out of office. If handled in a civil manner, it is a useful tool to spur development on a stagnant project.

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