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Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel communityGreg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel communityPosted Feb 4, 2010 15:34 UTC (Thu) by rich0 (guest, #55509)In reply to: Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community by cdibona Parent article: Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community Forks aren't always great, but I honestly don't think of forks as being a bad thing and I've tried to instill in Google the same ethic. The big problem with this sort of approach is that projects on the scale of something like Chrome or Android can turn into entities unto themselves with almost no connection to the projects they were derived from. The last time I downloaded the chromium source the tarball was around 0.5GB - almost all of it from forked dependencies. The resulting build is unnecessarily long, and it ends up losing any benefit from upstream improvements in any of those dependencies. If zlib or whatever fixes a security flaw I need to download and rebuild another 0.5GB tarball to incorporate the fix. A company the size of Google can sustain this, I guess, but it makes the resulting project unwieldy. There may not ever be a community-based version of chromium as a result, just as there is no practical community- based version of android out there now (I'd define community-based as a fork with no corporate sponsorship). On the other hand, that need-not remain the situation permanently, and there are signs that Google has been trying to integrate with upstream/etc (but they've dug themselves into a bit of a hole). Sure, forks aren't always a bad thing, but they can be counterproductive and they can lead to isolation. When there is no reason to persist with a fork it behooves us all to work together if we truly value the open source spirit.
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