On 10Mar2011 03:15, Meg <[email protected]> wrote: | And what is a fork?
The source code for various tools (eg mysql etc) is openly available. For the mainstream larger tools there will usually be a core group of people who look after the "master" copy of the course, and who thus release the "official" version of the tool. Everyone can have access to the source and can submit changes, but the accepted changes will go through some central team who keep things sane (QAing changes, rejecting unwanted changes etc). So as far as outsiders are concenred there is still one tool. However, sometimes the community have significant disagreements about how the main team runs things; control issues or design issues or different (conflicting) plans for what will happen in the future. Sometimes these disagreements cause a new team to take the current version of the code and proceed with development in their own direction; depending on the nature of the disagreement this may or may not result in two teams sharing changes with eeach other in the future. Anyway, now there are two teams, working on two copies of the source code. This branch in the tree of development is called a fork. Oracle bought MySQL a year or so ago and some of the community do not trust Oracle to continue MySQL development in a desirable fashion (since of course MySQL is a competitor for Oracles core db product). So the code is being forked, and developed by another team. Likewise with OpenOffice, LibreOffice is a fork of the main product. Emacs and XEmacs. Etc etc. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <[email protected]> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ Ergonomic and immediate unambiguous authentication - overhead by WIRED at the Intelligent Printing conference Oct2006 ------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this list, please email [email protected] & you will be removed.Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
