Dear Rob, Thanks for the pointer. Forking is indeed an interesting question. Having worked for Cisco, by no means an open source organization, I can witness that it is just as bad when development "is centralized within a firm and disciplined by market forces." As a matter of fact, I can think of no better example than MicroSoft's two lines of OS (95 - 98 vs. NT - XP).
In the case of open source, quality is regulated not only by market forces (which are just as strong), but also by democratic culture. "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947 (source: http://www.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill) best, - Yishay Mor -----Original Message----- From: Robert Sauer To: Yishay Mor Sent: 12/9/03 6:42 PM Subject: Re: Globes [online] - Open question Dear Yishay, Thanks very much for your comments. By the way, check out the story on slashdot (link below). Best Regards, Rob Sauer Dear Dr. Sauer, There is a story on http://slashdot.org/ referencing and article that you wrote about open source software and the danger of "forking". I am interested in reading the article, but could not find it on your faculty web site. You can see the Slashdot story at: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/09/149224 "Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source? "Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source? Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 09, @09:34AM from the forking-is-better-than-abandonment dept. TTL0 writes "In response to recent descisions in favour of Open Source in Israel (see here and here),Dr. Robert M. Sauer of the Department of Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and president of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. has written a article saying that the hidden costs of OS add up to a higher TCO. However, The greater danger Sauer writes, is that of a OS project forking. "The forking of open-source projects occurs when passionate disputes between open-source software developers over product design lead to the splintering of projects into a multitude of varieties. With proprietary software, forking generally does not take place since development is centralized within a firm and disciplined by market forces."" I've always seen Forking as something of a blessing... it's the abandoned projects are the ones that are in danger. Sincerely yours, Adam Adam Heath 87 Clarendon Ave. Somerville, MA 02144-1733 617.628.7357 617.803.0707 cell ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
