On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 00:38 +0100, Noah Slater wrote:
> I've never heard of anything like this before. In my experience, forks happen
> for licensing reasons, or functionality. I've never known any fork simply to
> split the development into two mutually compatible efforts.
For the longest time in programming history,
that was the normal way to do things. The
programmers at institution A would give a copy
of their program to the programmers at institution
B and they maintained their independent forks
while cooperating in a loosely coupled way (leaving
room for friendly rivalry). Within fairly recent
memory you can see examples like unix (at&t v. ucb).
More recently, debian v. ubuntu. Reaching back,
Emacs itself originated as an effort to merge a
bunch of forked macro packages for Teco. It's
the normal and natural way to work on most shared
programs.
> On the face of it, it seems like what would be an obvious duplication of
> effort
> for what seems like very little gain. Not meaning to be a pain in the bum, but
> do you have any examples of this having taken place before? If there is, I'd
> be
> very curious to understand what happened.
It's generally been a very successful approach.
I think that part of the reason it's such a huge win
is because you have redundant ("duplication of effort")
projects that maintain quasi-stable distros that are,
to some extent, substitutes for one another. It's the
difference between a proprietary product and a commodity.
-t
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