"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

I agree completely.

[ClioCJS]

There are 50,000 flavors of unix, but only one a few current flavors of windows in use. And there is only ever one "official, latest" version of windows. No, i don't count Advanced Server vs Server vs Prof as being differnet. They just have different packages installed.

The fact of the matter is, unix is ALWAYS behind windows. Until everyone UNITES, Microsoft will never be rightfully usurped.

This isn't just a problem in open source development either. Happens with multiplayer online game servers (Everyone decides to make their own mod, and we end up with 5000 different variation servers, each with 2 people on it. Hooray. Continuum and Quake3 both suffer from this.)