Penguinistas used to worry about the dreaded fork, especially of Linux. “What if Linux forks and becomes like Unix?” was a question often being posed in the open source media. Linus Torvalds would do his best to put those fears to rest, explaining that under the GPL forks are usually to be welcomed.
He was of the opinion that if a fork improves a product and is liked by the users, those changes will almost certainly be rolled back into the originating application. If not, and the fork is indeed a marked improvement on the original, then the fork becomes the standard bearer at the expense of the original application.
We’ve actually seen this theory in practice on numerous occasions, and it nearly always worked out just as Torvalds predicted. As an example, take the case of LibreOffice, which started as a fork of OpenOffice.org. Most users agree that The Document Foundation has greatly improved on the original OOo code, so much so that many if not most OpenOffice users have made the switch to LibreOffice.
|
|
|
Leave a Reply