"Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source?

TTL0 writes "In response to recent descisions in favour of Open Source in Israel (see here and here),Dr. Robert M. Sauer of the Department of Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and president of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. has written a article saying that the hidden costs of OS add up to a higher TCO. However, The greater danger Sauer writes, is that of a OS project forking. "The forking of open-source projects occurs when passionate disputes between open-source software developers over product design lead to the splintering of projects into a multitude of varieties. With proprietary software, forking generally does not take place since development is centralized within a firm and disciplined by market forces."" I've always seen Forking as something of a blessing... it's the abandoned projects are the ones that are in danger.

Comments

Forking? What forking?

[DrHyde]

I used to be scared that the open source software I used would fork, but it hasn't happened to Linux, nor to perl, nor to apache, nor to exim, nor to any of the other tools I use day in and day out. The only forks I've seen in major projects have been when a new version has been released but the old version has continued to have occasional maintenance patches released. And that, if anything, is *better* than what you get with commercial software.

I suppose OpenBSD could be considered a fork, but the effect on its parent has been practically nill - if anything it has benefited by back-porting work done by the paranoids at OpenBSD which simply wasn't happening before the fork.

Re:Forking is a problem

[jackb_guppy]

Now take look at Xwindows. There is no them and us so X is static - dead?

Now look at Smoothwall GPL vs IPCop, one was fork from the other. Smoothwall yesterday annouced GPL 2 version. It includes many features that have been in IPCop for up to 2 years. Smoothwall went away from the GPL users years ago, now with IPCop showing that users want and need growth, they have moved the project agian. - Alive.

It is the them and us that gives to growth. A single monolihtic project is dead, even if it does not know it.

Re:Link to the Article by Dr. Robert M. Sauer?

[kribor]

What about OpenOffice and MySQL ? Those are OS projects that supply what most businesses need. In the US, most businesses are small businesses. MS Office is for most of them, the extent of their automation, so I think the combo of OO/MySql is a decent example.

Also, Tomcat offers a viable alternative to Websphere for most application scenarios, if you are budget conscious. Not to mention that any savings you might realize with a MS solution initially may evaporate if you have to scale your architecture up for more capacity.

I do, however, agree with your closing premise. Not everyone that is concerned with support is a shill for Microsoft. Some of them are shills for RedHat :-)

Re:hm... sounds like science world

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The pope demanded that Galileo present the opposing argument (Copernican theory) in his treatise, as it was favored by the vatican. Galileo did this, but used the voice of a character called idiota. The pope took offense at this, and imprisoned Galileo.

The article link is ....

[aheath]

The article in question is Open question. The government claims open-source software means a 60% saving. It doesn't add up. Dr. Robert M. Sauer has a homepage if you are interested in finding out more about his other work.