In my opinion, this is just one of several situations where Pidgin developers have shown they don’t care what their users want. Since the introduction of MSN offline messages, Pidgin have swallowed them silently. There has been no fix because “none of the developers use MSN for much”.
points at etan look! The whole story!
Etan, to be clear – I’m not sure I agree with either party here. Certainly as a developer myself I can empathize. Users often have bad ideas of what they want, what makes sense, and general usability concepts. Saying “yes” to every user request is a recipe for disaster.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000109.html
What interests me most is the forking concept, why it matters, and how it works.
Anyway, if evolution and history is our guide (and isn’t it always?) I’d say it is unlikely Funpidgin will survive for very long.
Forking happens in the closed-source community too; however when it does, the fork usually has to start from scratch.
Jeff, I wasn’t trying to attack your or question your assertions (as such). I was responding more to the general tenor of the response posts. I would like nothing more than for this discussion to ignore the pidgin specifics and think about forking in general. That is a much more interesting topic.
I can’t say I think we, the developers, handled this as well as we could have, but I can say we didn’t handle it nearly as badly or as mean spiritedly as ‘common opinion’ would seem to think. That’s the only thing I’m trying to clear up. Consider this my last pidgin-auto-resize specific comment.
@Ciaran, @Etan Reisner:
My bad, crappy fact checking.
@Etan Reisner:
The resizing patch that funpidgin forked to apply was almost
instantly converted into a plugin
That’s the right way to go. I suppose in a couple of months, everybody complaining will install the plugin and never know this debate ever existed.
Pidgin itself is maybe not the point of this post, but the fact that a plugin exists now certainly makes it quite a bit less relevant.
The tricky thing about “the customer is always right” is that in the case of open source software, the developer is usually also a customer. So, if the customer is always right, then the developers of Pidgin were right and the dissenters, who forked the code, were also right. Accusations of who is on “high horse” become rather meaningless.
A long lasting fork-war has been the issue with XEmacs vs Emacs
I don’t know about the whole “we work for you” thing. The last thing you need is a bunch of script kiddies telling you how to do your job.
And then there’s the whole *nuke-based CMS ecosystem. I’ve lost count how many CMS’s started life as a fork of some *nuke-derivative or other.
I’ve used Xoops for a while, whose claim to fame is that it’s like phpnuke, except it’s rewritten to be object-oriented.
As if that’s a feature users care about!
Now I don’t want to knock Xoops, as it’s an excellent CMS, and making it OO does make a difference for plugin-writers. But just imagine Microsoft releasing a new version of Windows which is identical to the previous version, and try to sell it based on it being object oriented, because this makes life for application developers so much easier!
Philihp-
If they have to start from scratch, is it truly forking, or reverse-engineering? Or am I completely missing this concept?
Jeff,
As a programmer I’m disapointed that you missed out a possible outcome:
- Both original and fork die
Probably doesn’t happen in the real world, but we should never ignore a possible case.
dang. I had flash backs to my university days with C and the fork() system call. Now that was fun coding!
fork u!
Forking is from the 3rd and 4th freedoms.
Joomla is another example of a successful fork.
This happened recently to PunBB.
PunBB is a wonderful light weight message board, but the original developer and owner (who didn’t really have time to maintain it anymore) sold the rights to a company who promised to pay developers, market paid support and eventually sell paid extensions.
Some internal issues with all the lead developers and the new company caused them to give the middle finger to the new owners of PunBB, they took the GPL’d source code and forked it. The result is FluxBB which is basically the same as Pun but with it’s development not stalled or commercialised.
The new owners must be pretty pissed due to all the developers basically abandoning it as soon as it was bought, it’s clear that PunbBB will die and FluxBB will surpass it.
But, how can this be? I can’t browse the web without being poked in the eye by someone claiming Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operating systems. When the barrier to entry is essentially zero (and take a look at that “fork” chart for an example), how could anyone make that claim with a straight face?
@Jeroen:
But just imagine Microsoft releasing a new version of
Windows^H^H^H^H^H Java which is identical to the previous
version, and try to sell it. 
I could imagine a lot of MS products being ‘forked’. Those containing backwards compatible code, and those rewriting them without any consideration. It’d be interesting to see which one the user community backed, if they had enough visibility of both versions.
WRT OSS forking, this is just a good thing. If you disagree, you can re-use that code to make something better (or ‘better’ perhaps). Everything succeeds or fails according to how it provides for its users, so you should not restrict how it gets developed. There are a finite number of people who can work on a project (esp. an OSS one), so its not really reducing the development resources for the forked project either, and if there are enough users then there is no reason why both projects cannot thrive.
I’d be interested in seeing the linux distro timeline weighted for either actual usage or just plain interest. The current timeline implies that Yellow Dog is on parity with Red Hat.
Also, it looks like there is a 5th possibility. Multiple forks merge to form a new one.
Is it me or does that graph look like a space ship flying to the left.