Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
On Saturday 11 June 2005 16:10, trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com wrote:
Personally I dont see a problem with any of this. If digium makes it
too difficult to do stuff asterisk *can* be forked unless that is
forbidden (because its GPL I didnt bother to look at forking issues
Nope you can fork it, and in fact there have been several forks but AFAIK
they've all died out due to lack of mindshare.
I don't think that "lack of mindshare" completely defines the reasons
behind Asterisk fork failures. It places all of the blame on the
forkers. I think the truth, though, is that they not only fail due to
"lack of mindshare" but also due to competition from Digium's own
Asterisk community. Forks are not succeeding, yes, but Digium has a
hand in that... of course they do.
I've heard more talk about Asterisk forks than I've ever heard about
forks of any other other open-source project. I think that this says
something about how difficult-to-swallow Digium's dual-license decree is
for a lot of prospective contributors/developers.
In many other open source software projects forks actually are good
things for the community. Often, each fork of the software feeds off of
the others until they merge or until they diverge so completely that
they are distinct softwares. If you think of project "branches" as
forks (like the Linux kernel version branches, 2.4 vs 2.6) this becomes
even more apparent. Users and some contributors are working with a
different branch of the same software, make a contribution, and then
that contribution is ported to the other branches where it can be used.
We see this happen all of the time with the Linux kernel. It happens
with HylaFAX. It happened with X. I'm sure it happens a lot with many
other open-source software projects. It happens easily and usually is a
"healthy" process because the playing field is even.
Each distributor will often customize and build-on to a software
package. If this isn't apparent, then take a look sometime at the
myriad of patches that Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. apply
to many of the larger software packages (the kernel, Ghostscript, the
GUI) as they build them. For all intents and purposes, these are each a
separate fork of the software. Eventually these customizations can work
themselves back down into the original source repository, and the entire
community (including all of the forks) benefit from the exposure.
Of course, this "healthy" forking cannot be done with Asterisk because
Digium will not accept any non-disclaimed code into their repository.
Thus any fork will, by decree, become a competitive fork. It is not in
Digium's best interests to see forking succeed... otherwise they should
expect to lose market value in their investment - certainly they would
lose market share. And, for this reason, the playing field was set up
unevenly. It was Digium's code to contribute, and it was Digium's
perogative to set things up the way they did.
In this atmosphere of competition, then, a competing fork will never
succeed unless the fork goes into a lot of work setting up mailing
lists, setting up bug tracking, setting up web sites, download sites,
etc. Plus, the fork must continually monitor contributions to the
competitors and port them to their fork. And, then on top of all of
that, the fork must undergo a continuous development push that is
significant enough in comparison to the competition that gets it enough
exposure and attention to attract a user community and a developer
community in order to sustain the "arms race" until the purposes of the
fork are acheived. This is no easy task.
I think if all of those who have been discouraged to contribute to
Asterisk because of Digium's dual-license policy (and this is no small
number, mind you) were to unite and continue the fork with the same zeal
that they had in ranting and complaining about Digium, then I think a
fork could potentially succeed. But, unless someone can point me to
someone or some company that is going to make that happen, I don't think
that it will. I think that, for the most part, there's not enough
motivation behind the rants to make a successful fork happen in the face
of the competition.
Lee.
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