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Fear of forkingFear of forkingPosted Feb 28, 2006 22:50 UTC (Tue) by adren (guest, #20906)Parent article: Linux fragmenting at last?
There is an old article (1999) from Rick Moen on the subject called "Fear of forking" which explains that most forks eventually end up with a merge back to the original project or at least bring some improvements. Examples of such forks are : Unixes, emacs, gcc, glibc etc.
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Fear of forking Posted Feb 28, 2006 23:58 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] Indeed.
And while Rick and I don't like each other much this month (:-), he's still one of the 20 smartest people on the Internet, and I think he's right here, as well, as far as his piece applies.
I do, myself, tend to lean towards the guy who said that this is Pointless Panic (which wbagnfarb, BTW); and that the Red Hat guy is just fudslinging.
All The Smart People Don't Work For $YOUR_PET_PROJECT, guy.
Fear of forking Posted Mar 1, 2006 0:26 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I agree...
If this guy was worried about forking then he would be bitching about Redhat working on AIGLX rather then XGLX... which came first and needs work also.
With Apparmor I see it fuffilling a seperate nitch then what I've seen with SELinux. SELinux seems very restrictive, very limiting. I see it as usefull for interent servers and high security enterprise items. Relatively static deployments with highly skilled administrators with the time and budgets to make SELinux work. With AppArmor I see that more for higher security Desktop or Workstation enviroments were a administrator can simply run the profiler or however it works to lock down applications. Then it's easy enough to go and run again and again as applications evolve and roles change.
That and AppArmor was a existing application that Novell bought and GPL'd.
On the flip side why did Redhat buy out Netscape directory services and GFS stuff rather then working on existing items like Lustre or OpenLDAP?
I don't see any problems here.
And anyways in the long run AIGLX and XGLX are doomed. They are part of a evolution from 2-D desktop to 3-D one. It's needed and the work that both companies are putting into them is required and will probably be used to provide a 3rd more advanced/evolved X server.
It's probably the same thing with SELinux and AppArmor.. I can see these things evolving and lessons and code gained from both developements will provide a superior and more evolved solution in the future.
I mean that all of this stuff is very cutting edge.
Essentially with XGL-related items your taking networkable graphic display system and giving it full 3D acceleration, while maintaining backward compatability and a comfortable upgrade path for end users and developers.. and in the other case your trying make a Mandatory Access Control system and trying to make it usefull for the mainstream.
Nobody outside the Free/Open Source Software community is trying to do things like this. I don't think that anybody outside the Free/Open Source community is even capable of doing something like this.
And how it works in the community in the past is that you talk with your code. If you have a fantastic idea for the kernel, for instance, you can't just talk the Kernel developers into doing what you want.. You have to prove that your idea is superior to what they currently have and that is done with patches.
So in the case of both these companies they will choose one or another or a 3rd fork of either or both projects... Or the community will. Neither Novell or Redhat can hope to survive on their own, they absolutely need the support of programmers and such that operate completely outside their control. Either way I don't see a huge division forming.
Fear of forking Posted Mar 1, 2006 20:05 UTC (Wed) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] Jay, you're quite welcome to flatter me any time, but in truth I'm just an easily confused astygmatic Scandihoovian with a big mouth and a Web site. And thank you for mentioning that old essay, which does (still) seem a propos. All the Best,
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