Order

[Axel FILMORE]

On 16/05/2012 18:16, Will Fong wrote:
> One of the biggest problems I see with Linux (and many open source
> projects) is this extreme freedom to do whatever we want. While I
> truly appreciate having the freedom of choice, it puts us all into a
> bit of an elitist mindset that if others don't do what I want, I'll
> make my own. To me, this is anti-community. There are so many choices
> for software. What if we worked together instead of continually
> forking code?

Forks are part of the FOSS movement, Xorg, Compiz, GLibc, LibreOffice, 
Gcc are forks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection

"In 1997, a group of developers formed EGCS (Experimental/Enhanced GNU 
Compiler System),[14] to merge several experimental forks into a single 
project. The basis of the merger was a GCC development snapshot taken 
between the 2.7 and 2.81 releases. Projects merged included g77 
(FORTRAN), PGCC (P5 Pentium-optimized GCC), many C++ improvements, and 
many new architectures and operating system variants.[15][16]
EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, 
so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x 
compiler, "blessed" EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed 
the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. Furthermore, the 
project explicitly adopted the "bazaar" model over the "cathedral" 
model. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999, the two projects were 
once again united."


Even Ubuntu is a fork of Debian. Sometime, different forks are finally 
merged together, for example Compiz Fusion. :)


If you use PCManFM, you should know that it uses some widgets from
libexo which is part of XFCE, if you use LxPanel, then you should
know that it contains some code from fbpanel and also suxpanel I think...

I don't know if the model of FOSS is an efficient model, but, it
often works like this and sites like GitHub even encourages to
create some forks.

That's what gives the GPL, studying, modifying, distributing.

I agree with you that it's often more individualism than a real
community. That's life, that's probably in human nature to be
selfish.

Anyway, many thanks to Julien for the great work.

:)


-- 
Axel FILMORE
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