On 25 September 2011, at 23:17, Albert W. Hopkins wrote: > … > I think the important thing, for me anyway, is not the general user > community, but the "open source" development community. Most of those > people reluctant to sign their code over to another organization.
None of this has got anything to do with whether or not people will use it. > Or what if Red Hat designates some of their programmers to help make > Unity integrate better with Fedora, but wants to push those changes > upstream (like a good free software citizen). I somehow doubt Red Hat > is going to want to pay their employees to write code and turn over > ownership of it to Canonical. There are probably some other projects out there that we all use that are maintained most entirely by Red Hat. That doesn't stop us using them. Unity is maintained most entirely by Canonical. Why should that stop us using Unity on our desktops, if it's good enough? >> Unity is GPL. It can always be forked. > > Yeah, but not everyone is going to want to fork an entire software > project just to contribute some code and retain the rights to their own > code. Say for example someone is really passionate about accessibility > and wants to contribute to make desktop accessibility better, but > doesn't want to sign a CLA? I suspect there aren't that many people that really care. It's easy for us to armchair it here, but we're not going to get our heads down tomorrow and spend the next month creating code. The kind of person that does tends to just get on with coding, and is glad to see the code have a life of it's own once he's finished with it. If he signs the CLA, someone else will maintain it for him. Maybe Ubuntu will offer him a job - there can be lots of reasons someone might want to sign the CLA. > … This is why large community-lead free > software projects like Linux, KDE, and GNOME rarely have forks aside > from a few corporate-sponsored forks to fill a niche (e.g. Android). For the examples of projects-without-forks that you mention, we can find a bunch of other examples that *do* have forks. mplayer, Chrome and Chromium, Firefox / IceWeasel, loads of community builds of Android. Stroller.
