Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project

Posted Oct 24, 2019 20:43 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project by dowdle
Parent article: Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project

My concern is more that each and every individual GNU project will have to go through the same process as glibc. If that process ultimately involves forking, that'll be a rather large number of forks for everyone to re-converge on. Quite a lot of end users are still using Apache OpenOffice, even though LibreOffice has had unambiguously superior developer support for the past several years. If all of GNU forks, I have to wonder who will get left behind.

Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project

Posted Oct 24, 2019 21:05 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

I guess big part of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice installation base is on Windows (and maybe on OS X), where users have to look for software - and they might find the wrong one. I also guess most of the actually used GNU software is installed by some (Linux distribution) package manager, so only the maintainers of these distributions need to pick up the right fork.

Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project

Posted Oct 25, 2019 11:19 UTC (Fri) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link] (1 responses)

OTOH, when XFree86 had that licensing debacle, basically the entire world switched over to xorg almost immediately.

In the event of an impasse wrt changing GNU leadership, probably there would be a new organization (maybe ending in 'NG' for "Not GNU" -- TING Is Not GNU?) for all dissident projects to join.

Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project

Posted Oct 25, 2019 16:44 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

That would be the neatest outcome, but the Oracle precedent (i.e. the community basically sat back and watched as they systematically obliterated Sun's projects one by one, with a few isolated forks for the more popular projects here and there) has me worried.

Rethinking the governance of the GNU Project

Posted Oct 26, 2019 5:12 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

>If all of GNU forks, I have to wonder who will get left behind.
Lazy Docker users. Everyone else gets their base system libraries and binaries from the distro.