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

bah

[nomadic]

This story is just STUPID!! That's it, I'm starting my own slashdot!

Re:bah

[mattyrobinson69]

YEAH!!! lets fork slashdot into a pro-windows website and call it \.

Well, wait a minute...

[Tackhead]

> 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.

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!

Like the "Linux is Obsolete" flame war of 1992?

[theluckyleper]

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"?

Say what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Flame Wars through history

[gowen]

This article looks at some of the benefits of forking and flame wars through history.

Hey! Who remembers that crazy flame fest between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Man, those guys were really wailing at each other on IRC. Lenin called Martov a lam3r, and then Kollontai said he was like totally quitting cos no-one respected his L33T SKILLZ!

Crazy.

Oh, wait, you meant "in the last ten years". My bad.

I think I speak for all of us when I say...

[testing124]

Goodbye, XFree86.

Analogy Police

[BabyDave]

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.

So they're saying we should drop an asteroid on the XFree86 developers?

We need a way to score articles

[salesgeek]

So we can vote articles like this one:

Argument leads to better ideas.

Obvious -1

Forks == the power of Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

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.

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.

Andy's Current Take

[bill_mcgonigle]

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!

No kidding!

[phorm]

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!