Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces

Mr. Quick writes "From Metapkg, "In order to better provide freely-available software to users of Mac OS X and Darwin, we Fink, Gentoo, and DarwinPorts commit ourselves to work together." A unified front for free software on Mac OS X is something that was needed."

Comments

Name for the United Front?

[TPIRman]

What will this new collaboration be called?

DarFinkGen?
FinkTooWin?

Firebird?

Re:Name for the United Front?

[mikeophile]

MacJustice League Superfriends X?

Uh.. so

[Anonymous Coward]

So while this is really cool, how is it going to work out?

To wit: thought maybe i'm on crack, it SEEMS like each of the three-- while offering basically the same interface to the same service-- were pegged to different codebases, and taking packages from different sources. Fink to debian, gentoo to gentoo and ports to bsd.

Is this the case? And which source (debian/gentoo/bsd) will the collaboration generally follow?

Coordination in Open Source development.

[dwerg]

I think most people don't understand how unique this initiative is. Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.

It's good too see there are some developers out there with organizational talents who are willing to communicate with other projects in order to speed up development time and create a better product.

Re:This is what Linux needs

[90XDoubleSide]

These group's aren't merging into one project: they're still making three products, but will be working together to ensure there is sharing of work and no duplication of effort. This is indeed different from most OSS projects where the two competitiors come to hate each other for some reason. Another groundbreaking thought from their mission statement: "Non-advocacy: Our common goal is simply to provide software for people who choose to use Mac OS X & Darwin, not to promote or advocate any particular operating system." OSS with non-advocacy! Imagine how much more acceptance open-source software might get if everyone focused on telling people how the development model could produce great software at no cost to the user instead of droning on about how it is immoral for programmers to serve as wage-labor.

Re:What about Apple?

[Halo1]

Apple is more or less part of the darwinports project (Jordan K Hubbard is one of its project leads)