Comment by t43562
6 months ago
Either software is free or it isn't. You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom. Android is an example of an effort that took something free and made a usable mobile operating system ontop of it - but lead straight back to the problem that it isn't fully free.
Hm, there is also an option to avoid creating yet another fork the moment someone said something unpopular, or to try helping improve existing solutions instead of creating yet another cool project that achieves nothing.
Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.
Forks happen, I think, because someone doesn't agree with the direction or can't get accepted into the clique of people working on something.
So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.
I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.
That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.
Graceful forking is different than .. what too often happens with keyboard warrioring.
> You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom
But that's how a lot of projects do: Apache for instance, nginx, or llvm.
The problem is not being OSS, it is the lack of focus, and a game where everybody brings their ball and are playing the way they want instead of an unified game
To take LLVM as a convenient example ... why does it exist? Why didn't Apple pour its money into GCC?
Why does nginx exist? They could simply have found that config bug in Apache that made Apache slower and we wouldn't have needed another web server...?
Licensing reasons apart it's exactly because governance, even of these big projects like GCC suck
Every project should have some competition, in the same way there are several commercial DBs available
At the same time we have several linux distros that suck in different ways
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