Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom

Posted by Hemos on from the controversial-ideas dept.

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."

9 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. All-in-one-page version.... by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...is here.

    Nice history lesson on EGCS. I wondered how that got sorted out...

    --
    The Army reading list
    1. Re:All-in-one-page version.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Actually, the GCC people (including the old EGCS team) get very touchy when this subject fo the old fork comes up. Aparently every third party thinks there was a big flame war and what not, but it wasn't, it was more like a branch.

      The then-GCC (2.7 I think) was the stable branch, into which getting a patch was hard, as this article mentions. EGCS was the Experimental GCC Compiling System, into which all the new ideas and rewrites went. When EGCS became stable enough, it became GCC 2.8, with no hard feelings between the two.

      But every once in a while some idiot will come into the mailing list saying that they should fork for his new crazy ideas that aren't getting accepted, just like EGCS did, and aparently, the whole mailing list is tired of it.

      (For those who don't know, GCC doesn't have a single person that approves patches, like Linus, but instead any nontrivial patch needs to be reviewed and OK'd by two mantainers (one if the writer is a mantainer), which makes the process smoother, but also means that patches can fall through the cracks if you don't keep reminding people to review them, which is frustrating)

    2. Re:All-in-one-page version.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      There were no hard feelings, all were friends. If you go to gcc.gnu.org, the logo on the front page is the old EGCS logo, a gnu breaking out of an egg (Egcs, get it?), they just wrote GCC on it instead of EGCS.

  2. try this =) by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Informative
    Benefits of forking

    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
  3. Huh. by shrykk · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 /* Reduce memory usage */
  4. Andy's Current Take by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Informative
    I figured I'd see why Andy's current take on Linux is. From his FAQ:
    What do you think of Linux?

    I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.
    I was most surprised by the number 40,000. It cetainly seems Linus was the right man in the right place at the right time - linux was just begging to happen!
    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  5. Re:We need a way to score articles by AntsInMyPants · · Score: 2, Informative

    It may be obvious to those who already buy into the FOSS movement, but not to those who don't. In fact Forks and arguments like these are used to put FOSS in a negative light as being unstable and counterproductive. This article does a good job of showing otherwise.

  6. Re:It's like capitalism by dmaxwell · · Score: 2, Informative

    Positive changes happened to KDE and QT's licensing because of that fork. If GNOME hadn't come along, KDE would probably still be technically illegal to distribute to this day. This isn't how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-pin. As FOSS grows in use and acceptance, the amount of money flowing around grows as well. This inevitably leads to toes stepped on and in our unenlightened society THAT leads to lawyers flinging monkey poo. Like it or not, "What are the legal risks?" are questions FOSS distributers have to ask and answer. The old mentality of "I'm just going to code something cool and to hell with all this legal stuff." just doesn't cut it anymore. The fact that KDE got a good legal bill of health boosted its distribution and number of contributers dramatically. These "pointless" legal pissing matches matter.

    Yeah, the KDE/Gnome thing sucks I'll grant you but it won't be the killer it used to be. Freedesktop.org and tech like D-BUS is catching on nicely. What you run won't be anything more than a preference and everything will talk to everything else.

  7. Re:No kidding! by GtKincaid · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just to point out that ubuntu horay has an x.org port which you could use , so if anyone who uses debian has a problem with the xfree politics its possible to switch.
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hoary main
    iirc thats the repository
    to stay on topic for a while , Forks ussualy cause problems but in this bussiness Egos are going to emerge . Creative people have Egos and Egos can destroy projects , a good project leader knows how to stroke the conflicting egos properly to keep us all in line