One of the most controversial freedoms of free software is the right to simply take the code and go make your own competing project — what is popularly called a “fork”. It’s controversial but it is a critical freedom to have. This FSM article outlines the reasoning in a clear fashion and is complete with historical examples.
Read more »The Freedom to Fork
Category: Philosophy Tags:
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Forking Mandriva Linux: The birth of Mageia
Mandriva, one of my favorite Linux distributions, has been forked, and the new distribution is named Mageia. With the well publicized mass exodus of developers and contributors, this does not come as shock. I usually view these developments with caution, but this one I am actually happy about. Here are my reasons:
Read more »Have Debian Forks Hurt Debian?
It has been argued both ways for years. Both sides have valid points, and experience varies so widely depending on so many factors that it seems impossible to come to a conclusion.
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Novell is not forking OpenOffice
From recent media reports, casual readers could easily believe that OpenOffice.org, the popular free office suite, is fragmenting.
Read more »Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks
"Kohei Yoshida wrote a long post on the history of Calc Solver, an optimization solver module for the Calc component of OpenOffice.org. After three years of jumping through Sun's hoops on his own time, Sun says it will duplicate the work because Kohei doesn't want to sign over ownership of the code. Adding insult to injury, Sun then invites him join this duplication.
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