Adam @ Heroku - Latest Comments in Github vs Sourceforge

Re: Github vs Sourceforge

me — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:58:26 -0000

Well... forking source code and forking whole project is not the same as all. But git is cool, thus github is cool too!

Re: Github vs Sourceforge

Gaveen — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:35:58 -0000

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/200...

Re: Github vs Sourceforge

Adam Wiggins — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:09:23 -0000

You make a very excellent point, Jörg. :) I'll update the post to exclude the kernel as an example.

Re: Github vs Sourceforge

Jörg W Mittag — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:33:46 -0000

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 ...

Re: Github vs Sourceforge

Charlie — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:31:16 -0000

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/...