The value of middlemen

Posted Aug 17, 2004 5:08 UTC (Tue) by mbp (subscriber, #2737)
In reply to: The value of middlemen by wookey
Parent article: The value of middlemen

I actually do mean "fork".

When, as is apparently the case here, the upstream developer simply will not take patches that almost everyone else agrees is a good idea, then it's time to fork. There *is* a time and a place for forking.

(If it turns out that the author was right, the patches were a bad idea, and nobody uses them... well, that's life. But I don't think that would be the case here.)

It would hardly be the first time. Somebody else mentioned XFree86. An even more relevant example is OpenSSH: when the original maintainer went off into a proprietary development, a fork arose and all the distributions adopted it.

If somebody forked cdrecord into a free version that could record DVDs I think that would be great too.

The choice here is not between zero forks and one fork. It is between one open fork, or alternatively every distribution applying different random patches.

>> Which one, overweening, system would you have us all use?

The one which allows you to say "cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrw". Is that so unreasonable?