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."

Comments

We need a way to score articles

[salesgeek]

So we can vote articles like this one:

Argument leads to better ideas.

Obvious -1

The XEmacs/GNU Emacs fork

[Coryoth]

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.