Fighting? [LWN.net]

Fighting?

Posted Feb 7, 2007 18:28 UTC (Wed) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426)
In reply to: Fighting? by moxfyre
Parent article: Second batch of FOSDEM interviews

Competition is good. But forks are almost always a bad thing.

If you look at the Gnome vs KDE thing, everything is OK now (a long time ago, it used to be a different story). We have XDG, which has actually improved the quality of both Gnome and KDE (and other DEs like XFCE), and has made applications largely DE independent. The two projects have different aims and a healthy number of developers, and as a user I benefit from this.

On the other hand forks can have a really devastating effect on a project. The best case scenario is that you get something like the XFree/X.org split where one of the projects dies really quickly, and everyone can just get back to work. But other times the forks just linger on, things become incompatible, efforts are duplicated, and you're never really sure what supports what. This is especially true for specialized projects like Compiz/Beryl -- there just aren't very many developers with the expertise to hack on these projects. Splitting the small talent pool just exacerbates the situation, especially when the goals of Compiz and Beryl are 90% the same. As far as I can tell, Beryl is just Compiz with a GUI config tool, better KDE support, and one or two extra plugins. Why was a fork necessary again?

The Beryl project seems to have more momentum behind it right now, so unless Compiz is adopted by Gnome or gets more support thrown behind it from another distributor, it looks like Compiz will quietly die off. But Metacity and KWin are great window managers already, not to mention <insert your favorite lightweight WM here>. This has led to efforts like libcm to create a compositing library that other window managers can easily take advantage. My fingers are crossed that this approach will prove successful, but in the meantime I don't think that the fragmentation in the community is leading to a lot of "cross-pollination".

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