On Dec 8, 2014, at 2:12 PM, Harald Hanche-Olsen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> And here is the original blog post that sparked the discussion.
>
> http://wesleyio.tumblr.com/post/104637877991/node-js-is-forked-not-f-ed
>
Where in we read: "Now, some people will scream about fragmentation”. People do
not scream about fragmentation, they worry about it. And it is a very
legitimate worry.
The author of the above post has written well but the point, as he
acknowledges, is an old one:
"This is precisely the beauty of open source. Iojs makes something awesome, and
the guys at nodejs copy the feature. The reverse situation could also happen.
This idea that there are ‘tribes’ within open source is quite silly. Either
party can copy the other at any time. If anything, their competitiveness may
increase the quality of both pieces of software.”
The idea is that by enabling developers or groups of developers to branch the
project as they see fit, simultaneously, we increase developer freedom, which
in turn leads to competition that lets the best branch rise to the top, thus
benefitting the user.
It looks good in theory. In reality, it does increase developer freedom (hence
the near universal love for the fork’ing model from developers involved), the
gains for the user (in this case, other developers) is dubious or at least
arguable. For one thing, there is information asymmetry: # of open issues, # of
committers, etc, have been offered as measures of a project’s popularity, but
they are crude measures, and trivially useless when it comes to new forks. What
the user (again, in this case those building NodeJS or other Open Source based
applications), especially new users, are left with is a confusing array of
choices and no expertise to choose among them.
I do not argue that this particular fork (or set of forks) is a bad one. I do
not know enough to even remotely answer that. What I do think is that there is
no predetermined rule by which all forking is good. Node is far from f*cked.
But whether it will benefit, or rather, whether I as a user of NodeJS will
benefit from the current churn remains, at least to me, to be seen.
Regards,
—ravi
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