aside : can you imagine my joy naming an exhibition, 'the garden of forking paths' ps: and thanks ruth for agreeing :)
On 27/11/2009, at 1:49 AM, james morris wrote: > >> make art - a week dedicated to the world of Free Software and >> digital art >> organised by goto10 > ... >> This year make art focusses on distributed and open practices in >> FLOSS art. >> What the fork?! is about decentralization. Forking is the new >> black. Work >> from one source, copy, patch, improve, experiment, change direction, >> inspire! Forking is not about quick hacks, but about creating room to >> experiment, letting go of the one working copy and creating a >> multiplicity >> of ideas. > > i kind of find this irritating, it seem to be suggesting people fork > projects just for the hell of it - let's do all those things the > original developers never wanted their projects to be - and remember, > most open source projects start out because the developer(s) had > like-minded goals as the above goals state. > > i think forking of an open source project is generally not taken > lightly > and is seen as a last resort when disputes/disagreements between > developers of the project cannot be resolved in any other way. > > i'd be interested to know what kind of projects are intended to be > forked, or more precisely what complexity/size? > > there's no point in forking a big project to just add a handful of > experimental or idiosyncratic features. > > > however, while i'm a little critical of "what the fork!" the project i > forked (gfract to create gkII*) a few years ago was because i patched, > improved (arguable), experimented (definitely), and changed direction. > > in my case, i was never a developer of the project i forked. when I > forked gfract and formed gkII, my contact with the author of gfract > resulted in the update of his code (ie from GTK, to GTK2), and he also > developed what in his opinion was a better implementation of part > of the > user interface i had developed in my experiments. There were also > features he simply disliked, and he then implemented in ways I > disliked. > But in this case it was all quite friendly and we simply wanted to do > things differently, and he also had more important things to work on. > > james. > > * http://www.jwm-art.net/gkII > currently does not compile unless you remove -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED > from the Makefile. > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
