DISQUS

Adam @ Heroku: Github vs Sourceforge

  • Jörg W Mittag · 11 months ago
    I agree with you in principle that many projects are much too afraid of forks. However, I think that your list of examples is a little bit off: I know that IBM maintains their own fork of Apache for the OS/400 operating system, called "IBM Web Server for OS/400 powered by Apache" and the relationship between IBM and the ASF seems to be just fine. Ubuntu actually encourages forking, in fact, they have even built tools and infrastructure to make creating these forks (called "Remixes") easy and straightforward. (The same applies e.g. to Fedoras "Respins".)

    And last but not least: Linux. Really? I mean ... REALLY? Linus Torvalds is the friggin' *inventor* of the "forks are good" mantra! In fact, this mantra is so important that he even wrote a version control system specifically to support it. You might have heard of it ...
  • adamheroku · 11 months ago
    You make a very excellent point, Jörg. :) I'll update the post to exclude the kernel as an example.
  • Charlie · 11 months ago
    Definitely. I remember wycats recently noting in his Rails-Merb converging work that "Moving rails to git made the work we're doing possible!"
    http://yehudakatz.com/2009/01/06/another-dispat...
  • gaveen · 11 months ago
    Agreed.

    We've seen forking in history (Eg: GCC, Compiere, SugarCRM, Pidgin, etc.) and we've also seen friendly merges (Eg: Compiz, GCC). However the concept was always considered with bit of an uneasy tone with it. It might not be the first time forking was seen is this light, but GitHub certainly took it to the masses. I agree to the fact that this signifies a new direction, step in Open Source movement.

    In fact I wrote a blogpost recently on the same topic at http://gaveen.owain.org/2008/11/open-source-fos...
  • me · 10 months ago
    Well... forking source code and forking whole project is not the same as all. But git is cool, thus github is cool too!