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Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom
Eugenia Loli-Queru writes "In the news media, it is generally shown that flame wars and forks are detrimental to the growth of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) But if we see the history of FOSS, both flame wars and forks have played a crucial role in determining both growth and direction of important projects. There are also arguments that this leads to fragmentation and marginalization. There is some truth in these arguments but there are a lot of benefits which are often overlooked. This article looks at some of the benefits of forking and flame wars through history."
Differing ideas compete, and the strong ones survive. Forks are just a different way of getting there.
This story is just STUPID!! That's it, I'm starting my own slashdot!
So in the interest of promoting better versions of firefox/linux, we should all be trolling this article, right? MEXICAN GAY JEW LIZARDS!
So Flamebait gets karma point now?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
...is here.
Nice history lesson on EGCS. I wondered how that got sorted out...
The Army reading list
You're wrong, and I'm right.
Well, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON, bud? Huh?
You can't post a juicy title like "Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom" without taking a side.
What are you, some kind of GNU/Commie? ESR-Capitalist? Microsoft Nazi? (Or a paid OS X shill?)
And if you're just trying to present both sides of the argument in a fair and balanced fashion (sorry, I know a friend who worked at FOX, but since his facts are licensed FreeBSD-style, it's OK if I use them on Slashdot), then what are you doing whining about it on Slashdot? For chrissakes, man, just do a CVS branch and start coding your own facts, dammit!
Preserved by Google:
Famous debate between Andy Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds
What OS would I be running now if Linus had just given up and said, "You're right"?
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
In the news media, it is generally shown that flame wars and forks are detrimental to the growth of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software)
No, it's claimed that flame wars and forks are detrimental. To show that something is detrimental would involve coming up with a bit of evidence.
Crazy.
Oh, wait, you meant "in the last ten years". My bad.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Goodbye, XFree86.
Karma: bad (mostly unaffected by funny mods)
So they're saying we should drop an asteroid on the XFree86 developers?
So we can vote articles like this one:
Argument leads to better ideas.
Obvious -1
-- $G
With proprietary software, even if your vendor is successful (Peoplesoft) you're likely to be trapped in a sucky end-of-life situation.
If your vendor isn't successful, the software just vanishes.
Forks protect against both of these.
"As long as they are done for the valid reasons and not due to political or personal reasons, they will thrive."
Heh, what about Theo's fork from NetBSD to create OpenBSD?
really? forks are related to the direction of a project??
*** ***
In the FOSS market, flamewars and forks generate different variations from a current path of development for software. These variations are then offered to the public and to computer-savy people. If they like it and there is interest in one variation over the others, then that variation wins in the FOSS market. More programmers will then sign on-board to develop winning the variation.
Thus, the FOSS market is a version of the commercial market.
I think that, in the FOSS market for people (like myself) with slow memory-limited computers, K-meleon has a good chance to dislodge Firefox. K-meleon is a fork from Firefox, and both are based on the same Gecko engine.
Forks also = shared devlopment time = apps that support one fork but not other = fragmentation = bad thing. This is one of the advantages and one of the problems of Open source vs. closed source. Consequently Windows has a benefit here. Say what you will but the windows development base is fairly unified and a concentration of efforts is easier; though admittedly less innovative than Linux granted forking produces new ideas. Not meant to be Linux bashing in favor of windows but this goes to show how windows isn't dying any time soon...
...in bed
When forks are brought about by personality conflicts and useless cruft, they're destined for failure... when they're brought about because something is impeding the progress of a motivated group of coders, they succeed.
That said, I think this article certainly was rather meaningless, and not really "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Actually, it is 92%. You forgot RMS and ESR.
--
Linux Torvlads
The downside is that when a project forks, there is much less opportunity for the public (non slashdot readers) to ever catch onto a good thing. Imagine the effect that it would have if Firefox forked, its current maintainers left the project b/c all the devs went to the forked project. You would have a bunch of people still using Firefox that would never switch to the new one (hell it took them long enough to trust something without the little "e" already). Firefox would go to shit because no one would maintain it. The fork would grow in popularity among the educated. Once Firefox broke the people that switched would slowly migrate back to IE.
So, in turn forks make Microsoft happy.
Do we want to do this?
The Emacs/XEmacs fork is given passing mention in the article, but is actually one of the more interesting ones. At the time XEmacs really did represent a step forward, mostly in its embrace of an X based GUI using modern toolkits. Consequently XEmacs tended to romp along and be the feature leader. Most recently, however, the situation has reversed. It is now XEmacs that is unwilling to use modern toolkits, and GNU Emacs is starting to push back.
Let's be frank, these days when we say "modern GUI toolkit" for X we mean wither GTK or QT. XEmacs does have GTK support, but the developers are not interested in it, and mostly it is just slow, and bug ridden, even in CVS. Compare that to Emacs, which has finally decided that GTK might not be such a bad idea. The current CVS versions of Emacs have excellent GTK support, making full use of the latest versions of GTK. It looks and behaves very nicely indeed, and integrates quite well into a GNOME desktop. The new GNU Emacs will also sport excellent Unicode support. It will be interesting to see how the GNU Emacs/XEmacs debate stands once XEmacs 22 and Emacs 22 come out. I expect to see GNU Emacs get a real boost in popularity.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
In the FOSS market, flamewars and forks generate different variations from a current path of development for software. These variations are then offered to the public and to computer-savy people. If they like it and there is interest in one variation over the others, then that variation wins in the FOSS market. More programmers will then sign on-board to develop winning the variation.
Thus, the FOSS market is a version of the commercial market.
I think that, in the FOSS market for people (like myself) with slow memory-limited computers, K-meleon has a good chance to dislodge Firefox. K-meleon is a fork from Firefox, and both are based on the same Gecko engine.
Forks spur competition. It is a bit like evolution. In nature, a new species survives if the differentiation from the dominant group gives it an advantage for survival in a hostile world. That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived. Being big and powerful is not as important as being able to adapt to changing conditions. Most of the time open source software succeeds, it is because the end users are included in the process of building the software and making decisions. It is inevitable then at some point there will be a divergence of views and a decision has to be made. Sometimes it is not possible to make the right decision as one does not have all the information and/or one's past experiences have led to a certain opinion (which may not be necessarily right according to others). This is fertile ground for a flame war and a fork.
Usually, it is possible that the fork will survive if it solves a pressing need which was overlooked or addressed insufficiently by the core group. Also in open source, after forks if one group is innovating more than the other and taking the right decisions, it will also attract the userbase over a period of time. The source code being freely available means one group can borrow ideas from another. So the best ideas get replicated across the forks. Often it is also seen that a particular developer is part of one or more projects (forks). As many forks want to retain their own identity, there is more innovation for differentiation from the other forks. Innovation is also due to the demands of a specialized userbase (example - cryptographic implementations in OpenBSD and implementation of ssh - OpenSSH). Now this leads to a positive feedback cycle - all the good stuff gets picked up by everyone and everyone is free to experiment more. An example in case are BSD variants - FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. FreeBSD and NetBSD use OpenSSH that has been developed by the OpenBSD team. The NetBSD Packages collection pkgsrc has been ported to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Forks also bring to notice some pressing need of the community when the lead programmers/core team ignore them. Even Richard Stallman agreed to pursue the egcs fork of gcc as the main branch for further development. Forks can sometimes be "healed" and the codebases merged. The GCC/EGCS example above is a case in point. Forks provide an opportunity for them to serve a specialised purpose while being able to incorporate changes from the new branch.
It is possible that forks may hurt large corporations which like to be able to control the direction of the product. This is the reason Sun will not release Solaris 10 and Java under a OSS license. If at all they release the source it will have some kind on a non-forking clause. Forks are always beneficial to the end user in the long run, though they might cause a bit of pain initially. Imposed control rather than concensus is central to the way big corporations operate but not the way a good team of hackers operate. This is due to the cathedral and bazaar model of development as described by Eric S Raymond.
Flame Wars
More often than not flame wars are precursor to forks - an indication that all is not well within the project. Flame wars can also happen if a radical new design or a drastic change to the project such as a license change or replacing a subsystem with a better one. Flaring opinions and bruised egos can damage the project but also enhance the project by hammering out new ideas in a public discussion (because the discussion is public also means the stakes are high). Bureaucracy and forced conformism is detrimental to the growth of a project. But this is the way order has been established in traditional companies. Flame wars and discussions are central to the development of OSS to explore different design issues, but they also harbor the potential to destroy the camaraderie in a project. It is important that they be taken in the right spirit or the whole project suffers. The reason why flame wars have go
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Forking is generally a bad idea, however there are exceptions. Usually it dilutes development efforts and progress, leads to fragmentation, confusion of the common user, and possibly lower quality software. If OSS was just a bit more fragmented it would probably not have become mainstream. Lets stick together, focus our potentials, and produce concentrated masterpieces of software that are here to stay!
I hate this no good article!
All the slashdot editors are big dummies!!
I'm gonna start my own slashdot!
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
Way back in the day, the two headed monster on Sesame street would say "two heads are better than one." No matter how creative a developer may think she is, someone else can look at an idea, and may come up with an improvement or suggestion. Isn't that the whole point of open source? Nothing gets hidden behind copyright laws, or (hopefully) obfuscation of code. Even if the leader is a total dunderhead, sufficiently skilled people can take over and move the project in another direction, or back in the original direction.
;)
Now, if we could get our country going the same way
You have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong, and I the right to ignore you.
Slightly off topic, but I was intrigued to read about the origins of the smiley in UserFriendly's link of the day. I particularly liked the character sequence to indicate flame bait (think of a candle). Doesn't quite work in all fonts, like the subject, but good for plain text
~=
This article is awful. Surely every slashdot reader knows about all the events in TFA, and the author doesn't make any new points.
Of course, ability to fork is a vital part of software freedom, but in a world of scarce developer time, it is vital not to let politics and personalities interfere with development of the best software.
#define struct union
You talkin' OSX? BSD? Solaris? Windows?
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
See how much better the movie is now:
Star Wars: Episode IV
Why, I bet some of you are still using Vi rather than Emacs, which is obviously the superior choice.
Of course, what do you expect from people who treat their enemies just like Hitler treated the Jews?
(Did I cover everything?)
- Crow T. Trollbot
Some designs guess which way the branch will go, and continue accordingly. When the branch condition becomes known, and it guessed wrong, it throws away all the work on that branch and starts over causing a pipeline stall. Often, extra bits are available in the branch instruction to provide hints on which branch decision is more likely. The processor may even keep stats on hot branches in a branch prediction cache.
Other designs work on both forks of a branch simultaneously. When the branch condition becomes known, the execution tree is pruned. A fork in an open source project effectively pursues both branches simultaneously. One difference is that while often one branch is discarded (e.g. what will probably happen with the XFree86 fork), but sometimes both become viable options (e.g. Gnome and KDE).
This is preserving the right that if you go under, they can fork your project.
It's so funny to hear commercial companies arguing against forks, when they so commonly demand them.
fork = genetic diversity
flame war = territorial battles
The point is that both of these are needed in a progressive system. For a proper society to move forward, people's feelings need to get hurt here and there. People need to be able to go off and explore new ideas on their own, and I think thats the whole point of OSS, as opposed to a company which classically has very strict production goals.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes, there are all kinds of hilarious little tidbits like that in there. In case you haven't seen it, here's Google's Usenet Timeline.
It has things like Linus' first post about Linux, some funny Microsoft posts, the first known Usenet spam, etc.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Theo
Theo
Theo
THEO
!!!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=96863&cid= 8281595
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
This article doesn't list my favorate (or really least favorate) reason for forks. Greed. The owner of the copyright for an open source project suddenly decide they aren't getting enough and goes nuts trying to make an open source copyright work like a standard copyright. Two examples are cdrecord and Sveasoft's Alchemy. Two great open source projects gone bad. I'd say more, but I don't need those guys going after me like they've attacked others.
Screw this! I'm gonna start my own Slashdot! With Blackjack, and Hookers. On second thought, forget the Blackjack.
One of the more interesting questions in economics is why decentralized forms of economic management like cooperatives or the old Syndicalist ideas never become widespread.
It would seem at first that an employee owned and managed business would easily out compete more proprietary ones. For example, employee owned businesses don't have to fire people when times get thin. Everybody just takes a pay cut and keeps working. The co-op can maintain the same output as before at a lower price.
Yet employee owned firms are very rare despite numerous attempts to create them over many years and in many different legal and economic environments. Studies have shown that such forms of organization fail due to phenomenon which we would call flamewars and forking. In short, politics either paralyzes the firm or causes factions to leave.
FOSS succeeds to the degree it does largely due the non-zero sum nature of its products. Forking causes only a dilution of developer time not the division of physical assets. Even so, excessive forking kills products. FOSS can stave off, but not eliminate, the inherent threats poised by decentralized management.
There is some tip point where creative give-and-take gives way to flamewars and where forking leads not to greater diversity and innovation but to a fatal dilution of effort and brand.
Might be a PH.d thesis in that for somebody
The Source Tree must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Forkers and Flamers.
Even in debian/unstable, we're still stuck without x.org - doesn't make a lot of sense to me as many other packages are generally up-to-the-day updated (most that I use seem to be within the week).
...
But still, we're stuck with Xfree4.3
I use to have an unofficial deb site which offered x.org, but that one died sometime ago as well... so I've been without x.org updates for awhile. I suppose one could use alien to debianize a bunch of RPM's but what a royal pain in the butt.
Come on debian package admins, the people want X.org!
Flame Wars
More often than not flame wars are precursor to forks
Right. That's why emacs forked from vi. I see that now.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
History is nothing more than the recounting of wars, and it is written by the victors.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
i regularly engage in lengthy debates about everything under the sun with a good friend of mine, who almost always takes an opposing view to mine. mainly his opposing stance is intentional, and he simply tries to debunk everything i say, even if he agrees with me. at first i found this extremely annoying - but now i regard these debates as an essential part of my intellectual growth. the reason is that he forces me to constantly re-evaluate what i already believe to be true. when i go back to research something to try and prove him wrong, i always discover a whole host of new details and factors that i did not know before. even if all the new data leads me back to the same conclusion, the point is that i wind up with an even more intimate understanding of the topic than before - and in some cases i find out i'm wrong.
i think this is true of any intellectual endeavor, whether it's software development, scientific research, or just debating with a friend. without friction, people become complacent, scientific theories don't get debunked, and software becomes stagnant. perhaps flaming each other is not the most effecient way to debate something - obviously a calm and organized exchange of ideas is generally a more beneficial way of interacting with people.
The jargon file defines flaming as, "To post an email message intended to insult and provoke." The high profile disputes the article discusses don't really have that the element of pettiness and spite that is the hallmark of fine flaming.
an ill wind that blows no good
-I think that the author has been using too much PowerPoint
-There are alot of good examples presented
-However, the tendency to make everything a bulletpoint, a la Powerpoint, can be overwhelming
-Case in point, Page 1
-Are you still reading this?
-This bullet is important, but I chose to put it down here because it doesn't seem "sexy" enough.
-At least he didn't choose an obnoxious background
-CONCLUSION: the author been using too much PowerPoint.
is it any suprise that software developement is starting to closely mimic nature? that parallel development leads to specializiation and survivalism? Weaker products either find a survival niche (something that they are really good at, akin to giraffes) or become overall a stronger competitor than everything else, not neccessarily the strongest, fastest, or anything but the most flexible (Linux is, Windows trys, kind of like the early stages of human development). Remember, there were two branches of development in our evolution too. Homo-Erectus killed off it's competitors, by being more aggressive (effective). So... do you think that Windows-E-Rectus will manage to kill off Linux-Superiorus?? Really though this shouldn't be any huge suprise to anyone, as software is a direct descendant of our own creativity, so it will mimic those patterns in life as we understand them. It is hard-coded into our BIOS you might say. Anyone watch the movie Pi?
I didn't know OSS programmers was pushing their gay agenda through software. Falwell must be informed. Afterall, if a married man uses Linux, he might turn gay, divorce his wife, find a gay lover, and undermine the current trend toward communism.
Open source projects are community affairs. When the community leaders become unresponsive to the community, a fork can become the only way to save the software, and thereby the community. Forks are competition - if the new fork is more popular, it can overcome the parent fork in the market - and outweigh the market confusion between the different, and potentially incomaptible versions.
--
make install -not war
BSD!
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Does this now mean that modding "flamebait" is now +6 on slashdot?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
FOSS advancement can be explained using evolutionary theory - basically, that mutation and fragmentation between groups is a good thing. Higher mutation rates increase a group's chance of survival - or in OSS terms: the higher "branching" rates are actually good for innovation and development.
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
fork-you!
Everybody is repeating the same nugget of obvious information that the article was based on. A piece of information that everybody here knows. This is a nothing conversation about the painfully obvious that's not going anywhere fast.
Bender is the bendiest!
so we can mod posts that say things like
"We need a way to score articles So we can vote articles like this one:
Argument leads to better ideas.
Obvious -1"
-5 Obvious
Feh, what we need is a less reliance on metal eatery and more practice with chopsticks.
/. non-informative editors.
I for one, hail our new
nt
Although the article lightly touches on OpenBSD in reference, I'm surprised an article that concentrates so much on flame wars and distribution forkings would omit talking about the origins of OpenBSD altogether. Though the details are sketchy to me after all these years, I remember distinctly Theo was a core NetBSD developer who's vitriolic and (at least I thought) humorous flames against people in the USENET community caused him to be ejected as a core developer, it was at least one major step that turned him into the direction of OpenBSD--that and the fact that he was prevelent at finding security holes in code that nobody had before him.
Though his fellow developers in the other BSD camps may (or may not) have liked him personally, you can be damned well sure they previewed his source control check-ins to see what he was patching.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
FreeBSD has unfortunately aged very poorly, they wasted too much time on something that doesn't really matter much, and is still not finished. Try out net and open, they are both similar enough to free that you'll be able to adjust pretty quick, and they both still have the clean, "designed" feeling freebsd used to have.
Oops, turns out you don't know what you are talking about huh? Acedemic bullshit doesn't matter, what it comes down to is either design can work fine, and for a user like you, you don't even know the difference.
Forks spur competition. It is a bit like evolution. In nature, a new species survives if the differentiation from the dominant group gives it an advantage for survival in a hostile world. That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.
1) The dinosaurs dominated the large animal niches for far longer than mammals have. It is a few hundred million years too early to start gloating.
2) The dinosaurs did survive - I can see their ancestors swimming around in the duckpond outside my window.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Bender: Oh, no room for Bender, huh? Fine! I'll go build my own lunar lander with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack.
[No reaction.]
Bender: Eh, screw the whole thing.
[Bender turns and walks away.]
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
NetBSD had taken the attitude that creating an OS was a popularity contest, and they needed to compete with freebsd and linux. Theo was kicked out because he didn't lick the assholes of every moron that is too lazy to read docs, so he made an OS focused on making a good OS, instead of licking assholes. The reason for making the OS was not political, the reason he got kicked out of netbsd was, not the same thing.
You are failing to make the distinction between research and bullshit, one is important, the other is for old men who are out of touch with reality to blather about and feel important while having no impact on the world. Academic bullshit most certainly does not matter, and microkernel vs monolithic kernel is academic bullshit.
Like the Byzantine fork of the Roman Empire project!
Two leading AOP projects, AspectJ and Aspectwerkz, just merged. Their technologies, developer skills, and user communities were complementary, and the resulting common platform will be developed quicker and be of better quality. The user community benefits from sharing and gets bigger, creating more shared benefits...
Competition is useful as incentive and to provide choice, but ultimately something wins because it's better. I think it better to win through mergers, which preserve the best of both companies, er, projects.
http://eclipse.org/aspectj
http://aspectwerkz.codehaus.org/
...is it really a problem that much? Isn't it more likely that people get turned on to Linux by someone handing them some disks or doing an install for them? So their first install sorta gets picked for them. maybe. I *doubt* many folks just arbitrarily one day decide to "do" linux and go over to Distrowatch. I think the various OSes there are more for folks who have already started in Linux and just want to try out various flavors then. Maybe I am wrong though, don't know. I have noticed, though,it's not like you waltz into Office Despot and see 85 whatever dozen different linux OS cds on the shelf. I don't think linux is quite there yet like ice cream flavors for the masses. Just not that common...yet..... and when it is, I doth predicteth it will be _so easy_ to roll your own custom distro to fit exactly what you want your computer to do, that that is what most folks *will* do.
Moderators: Please note that "bonch" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft shilling. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, bonch is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.
/. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than bonch. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider bonch and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Windows or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a
For example, in this recent post bonch not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "MS". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +0) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, bonch wants to be Bill Gates, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?
FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed yet? Don't forget that KDE and Gnome make you dumb, and it's all a Slashdot conspiracy. How low do you want to go? Maybe as low as this?
The infamous Slashdot Front Page Troll? Nuclear fireballs? It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on (troll?). Like the energizer bunny. Or take these two, which stretch the definition of weird.
It's up to you. We can get rid of this guy and make Slashdot a better place. I don't know about you, but I'd rather take the trolls and crapflooders over people like "bonch" any day. And I sure as hell don't want to be categorized along with him. This is not how you advocate free software, period.
Moderators: Please note that "bonch" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft shilling. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, bonch is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.
/. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than bonch. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider bonch and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Windows or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a
For example, in this recent post bonch not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "MS". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +0) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, bonch wants to be Bill Gates, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?
FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed yet? Don't forget that KDE and Gnome make you dumb, and it's all a Slashdot conspiracy. How low do you want to go? Maybe as low as this?
The infamous Slashdot Front Page Troll? Nuclear fireballs? It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on (troll?). Like the energizer bunny. Or take these two, which stretch the definition of weird.
It's up to you. We can get rid of this guy and make Slashdot a better place. I don't know about you, but I'd rather take the trolls and crapflooders over people like "bonch" any day. And I sure as hell don't want to be categorized along with him. This is not how you advocate free software, period.
The Single Biggest Advantage of Open Source software is that when the company/individual/team/whatever who is developing it no longer supports it well, it can be forked (FreeX86, and Blender are good examples).
Blender has been forked for that reason?
I know of three forks of blender:
The The official/original fork, that from the beginning has been "owned" by Ton and still, in part, is.
The Tuhopuu fork, that are are in the same control as the official fork, Tuhopuu is the "evil" tree, where the developers are allowed to experiment more.
Intrr's fork, instinctive-blender that he made because he simply wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted without interference. That fork is made only for his personal purposes and are not a competitor to the main fork.
In 2002 Ton decided that whe wanted to make Blender Open Source and the investors that owned Blender rights at the time agreed that it could be bought for 100,000EUR. The Blender Foundation Sucessfully collected the money and now Blender is GPL.
In no time has the responsible(mainly Ton) for the project lacked in handling the project for what I know.
More(and more accurate) Blender history.
[end flaming mode]
MULE was actually merged into XEmacs long before Emacs. But in XEmacs it was a compile time option, where in Emacs it was forced upon all users. Both places, MULE was rather buggy. In XEmacs it ment that sers just disabled it. For Emacs, it ment that users either refused to upgrade, fleed to XEmacs, or fixed the bugs. Anough choose the later that the result is that Emacs today have much better working Mule code than XEmacs.
The original reason for the fork was that Lucid could not get their patches integrated into GNU Emacs and released fast enough to fit their commercial interest, and RMS didn't care. So they made their own release.
Lucid *did* sign all the necessary paperworks, later contributers to the fork, in particular Sun, didn't. This loack of paperwork is a contributing factor that the two branches haven't been merged.
the ideas generally aren't that different,
so the survival really depends on the strength of the developer
(both his skill/determination and the support he can rally)