Comment by lolinder
10 months ago
I think that the open source community is too quick to make "just fork it later" the answer to all our governance woes.
Look at the state of WordPress: the (B?)DFL actively bans people from the community for critiquing his self-described "nuclear war" waged against his biggest competitor in the hosting space, which "nuclear war" has caught thousands of members of the community in the crossfire. And yet we see no fork. Why? Because forking is hard and fragments the community, so people would rather put up with a tyrant than deal with the risk of instability. This is no different than tyrants in any other environment.
If a project has good governance established from the beginning, including a reasonably democratic process for contributors to elect the executive function, then the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.
A difference between Wordpress and Organic Maps, though, is that Wordpress is a framework whereas Organic Maps is an application. Switching to a fork of Wordpress means a different extension marketplace, various config files that may need to be changed, etc. Switching to a fork of Organic Maps is just downloading a different app that does the same thing.
Completely irrespective of the governance structure of Organic Maps, by its nature it is much more easily forkable than something like Wordpress.
There needs to be a server generating up to date map files. Which isn't complicated in comparison, but it's a decent bit of resources.
Forkability is an underused metric when evaluating an open source tool.
> Apes Together Strong
Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all.
In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.
For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
Perfection is the enemy of progress. And when things go all bad and you have used all other alternative, then and only then forking should be considered. Like a nuclear button.
Currently i feel like it's more often used by newcomer that want to get to the lead position of a project they are passionate about but didn't start, so they fork and get a fraction of the community behind. It's not much but it's still a bit.
Un(?)fortunately, us Organic Maps forkers have been with the project since Organic Maps was OMaps, and before. The only people with more commits than the senior fork member are the OM co-owners themselves. We really tried getting OM to deliver on their promises, but it seems silence is preferable to accountability for them.
>In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.
Initially I instinctively agreed with you - certainly there's too many fragmentation in the Linux distro space!
Then I recalled I use NixOs, and it probably didn't make it to your top 3...
Couldn't nixos main feature be implemented in a mainstream distribution ?
Technically you can install nix package manager on Debian, and what is nixos main interest without it's package manager ?
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> yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
In practice yes, since Canonical is replacing essential system components to depend on snap. So you can't just "not use it", you're forced to be dependent on their upstream package hosting service that you can't rehost yourself.
If I understand correctly, there is work going in inside the WordPress community. Not sure if and when things will happen, I am not involved personally.