Forking is OK

Colmeia Off Topics - São Paulo

Fabricio Campos Zuardi fabricio.org

Apresentaçao

Hacker Culture

scratch an itch
open source products

WONTFIX

projetos open vs. corporate culture

[Business leaders] They don't LIKE you. Because they need you but they don't understand anything you do. -- Zed Shaw
fight your harder not to be a corporate coder

Free Revealing

Vale a pena? (Free Revealing vs Secret/patents from Democratizing Innovation)
Innovators do not think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties
little profit is sacrificed when you choose to forgo the possibility of legally protect your invention instead of free revealing
Positive Incentives for free revealing

reputation gain
increase programmer's value on the job market
increase firm's profit if the revealed innovation is specific to assets owned by the innovator
can become an informal standard that may preempt the development of other versions of the innovation

If you're so worried about people forking the code that you actually want to install barriers to prevent it, then perhaps FOSS is not for you.

Forking

project centric-versus people centric, or the David x Chris discussion

Developer > Project, or Project > Developer(s)
modelos open source: benevolent dictator (linux) vs. group of people who make decisions and act as arbiters of what goes into the project (apache)

In volunteer-run FOSS projects, you want lots of forks; It means work is getting done.

Mostrar a visualization dos checkins no Rails aqui

Cases

Fork cases (nao se assuste com o tamanho, vai cair p/ menos da metade)
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** Emacs/Stallman GPL mentallity: "People should send changes back to me so I could add them to the distribution." == control -> falta desapego
** XEmacs case is very interesting
** EGCS For whatever reason, Stallman's Free Software Foundation (developers of the GNU Project) continued to act as if egcs didn't exist. So, GNU/Linux distributions began to emerge based on egcs, and the free-software world began to mostly ignore gcc. 
** Apache: Development at NCSA had stalled after the package's original creator, Rob McCool, left the Center. If that happened to a proprietary product, it would just die, leaving all its users in the lurch. However, because the product was so useful, the Apache Group forked the source code and kept driving it forward.
* Firefox: "Mozilla kitchen sink":https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122411 ("demo":http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensink.xml) > Mozilla fork > "Phoenix":http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/0.1.html >proved that is better > becomes main Mozilla product
** Webkit from KHTML, and people talking about "unforking it":http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/07/the-unforking-of-kdes-khtml-and-webkit.ars
*** Forking WebKit from KHTML wasn't a conscious act as much as it was a consequence of Apple's development efforts not meshing well with KDE's.
Apple programmers made updates to KHTML over time, and indeed released their changes back upstream to KHTML. However, Apple did so by periodically releasing tarballs of the modified KHTML. There was no indication of which change corresponded to which feature.
KHTML was left with the option of either incorporating Apple's changes blindly (which would have been irresponsible) or laboriously analyzing diffs of Apple's tarballs with the KHTML trunk to try to figure out why changes were made on a line-by-line bases (which would have taken an inconvenient number of decades).
Since neither option was possible, Apple's version became a fork, and that fork is named WebKit.
** http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/ - What makes us different from the official client, is that we work for you. Unlike the Pidgin developers, we believe the user should have the final say in what goes into the program.
*** o ticket da discordia WONTFIX http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986
** retro pages and screenshots can be fun here: http://web.archive.org/web/20020912100953/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/phoenix/releases/ http://web.archive.org/web/20040813040541/mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/todo.html
* "UNIX BSD and historic forks":http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/forking.html
* "Other notorious forks":http://lwn.net/Articles/298015/ ("article":http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/11/10-interesting-open-source-software-forks-and-why-they-happened/)
** Inkscape from Sodipodi
** Current X.org from Xfree86
** Ubuntu - "To fork or not to fork":http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html distributed vcs!
*** http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/11/10-interesting-open-source-software-forks-and-why-they-happened/#comment-290814

Folk Logic (after Yoz)

computing in the 80s
lower the costs/barrier, allow amateurs to participate
Wordpress plugins ecosystem
MS Excel macros
Firefox extentions, XUL, chrome
Internet Platforms
clonability
the importance of not need to ask permission => participate without asking permission
projetos promissores: Ning, Freebase, BUG Labs, Android

Reasons to fork

frustration
disagreement
very specific problem
trademark issues
main developer lose interest
dead projects > most projects on sourceforge are abandoned

Forking is OK

05/02/2009

Forking is OK

Colmeia Off Topics - São Paulo

Apresentaçao

Hacker Culture

Free Revealing

Forking

Cases

Folk Logic (after Yoz)

Reasons to fork

Fork downsides

Saindo do código (what about content?)

The end