"Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday December 9, 2003 @02:34AM from the forking-is-better-than-abandonment dept.

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.

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Re:Forking is a problem by jackb_guppy · 2003-12-09 02:53 · Score: 3, Informative

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.