Jeff, I love your writing, but seriously, do some Open Source development. You’re so close to understanding it, but really you have to get involved with it, then you’ll be able to connect the dots. And then you’ll be the best blog on the Net.
Nice work
It’s the ultimate “let the market decide”. The market can take your exact product and move it into a different direction.
I like the freedom offered by this model. While forking might have the disadvantage of reinventing the wheel sometime, it does give the developers absolute freedom to work on what they like doing.
Another famous fork is Gnome/KDE. Also, one can mention Compiz/Beryl, that later merged back into Compiz Fusion.
That timeline certainly is interesting. Of course, it’s also outdated, more distros have been released since 2007. Anyone interested should head over to distrowatch.org to see them sorted by popularity. Personally, I prefer Arch 
I noticed that the Pidgin 3rd party plugins page doesn’t list the Entry Area Manual Sizing plugin… you have to grab the .dll or .so directly from the plugin’s Trac page on developer.pidgin.im: a href="http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/5296"http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/5296/a
I’m more into Miranda IM than pidgim. Miranda is more plugin oriented, almost every UI element and most non-UI are implemented in plugins. If you think about it is not better for open source software to be this way? If you consider every package to be a plugin won’t linux be this way too?
I think a lot of people here are missing the entire point of forking. If the pidgin design issues were really that bad, something would have replaced it long ago. That’s what forking is all about. Remember, for every feature you hate it’s well possible there are thousands of users who actually like it.
For my part I got tired of resizing my text input window myself and just kept it at the minimal size, reducing the usability since when I had to type long bits it was hard to go back to what I wrote. Now it’s autoresizing and I must say I really like it.
What I find offensive in this thread is not that some people like it differently (there’s something to be said for that) but that they insist that it’s the One Right Way™ and we should all just ascribe to their point of view. (for instance read spook’s comment in this thread) I guess that’s where all those religious wars related to forks come from. Perhaps that is even an inescapable part of forking: you need that sort of silly outrage at some feature you hate to actually motivate you to put all the work in.
As an aside, in the case of pidgin, they’ve been really brave about changing the interface to be better designed, easier to use and better on the eyes. And usually where there is a feature you don’t like or don’t have plugins are available or can be written to change that for you. So funpidgin is really looking like an evolutionary dead-end to me. Well, maybe unless they implement a REAL feature and put webcam support in it or something.
Hoffman:
Linux’s kernel is monolithic rather than a microkernel. While there are dynamically loadable kernel modules for drivers, the majority is one large binary.
@Powerlord
So a 1.8MB kernel forms the majority when there are 173MB of dynamically loadable kernel modules on a stock ubuntu hardy kernel? I might be wrong but I thought that the dynamically loadable modules formed the majority.
That looks like a chart a saw a few years back showing the succession of churches since the church of England from the Catholic Church. So yeah, I guess the church has been forked as well.
That aside, I agree, “we’re legally allowed to fork but technically roadblocked.”
Etan Reisner, stop that crazy fight and move on to more serious business: make available a way to stop the freaking multicolored nicknames in pidgin chats with multiple users. I’m going BLIND over those colors.
Jesus T. Christ.
Digsby FTW
Dump pidgin it doesn’t hold a feather to The Digsby (haha)
@ka2:
You’re right, I phrased that badly. I meant that the majority of operations that a kernel is expected to do is contained in one large binary.
@N: pidgin is already like that. There is a text-only UI that uses the same underlying backend.
I like that the image says “feel free to modify”.
Because “GNU/Linux” is an abomination, and that penguin is stupid, and always has been.
I’m surprised the broohaha over Firefox ‘awesomebar’ and Likewise its google-isation and other financial influences hasn’t produced a fork.
Then I realised what a PITA it was to even compile the code, nevermind make amendments (in accordance with all due copyright etc).
As a geek I thoroughly enjoy cruising the various Linux distros to find one that works on my old hardware (I gave up hope of wireless networking of course). I like that when I try on distro and don’t like it, there are so many alternatives. On the downside, there are soooo many its nigh impossible to hope to find the ideal one.
Also, perhaps off-topic, but it is a myth that “open source” means “open” in any meaningful way. Open, accessible source solutions would be my preference; not just allowing the code to be reviewed and modified, but actually encouraged. Let the various forks work out the issues themselves, feeding back to the communities, rather than filing bug reports like “disable awesomebar hidden preference”, which aren’t bugs, but a pretence at openness and transparency.
The logical choice would be to separate the GUI from the back end and make it skinable.
Haha debian should taken down the list, it slowly become the most unsecure distro. Openssl r0fl, uberpwnage for those who know what to do.
Yeah big fucking tree, but beyond the big project what we all know, the other smallones either dead, unsupported or noone uses them like zenwalk.
Since noone going to rely on a distro which not backed up by community, people just won’t use it, why would they?
This tree is stupid, it should rather start it from 2008 and only with the big distro names.
Haha debian should taken down the list, it slowly become the most unsecure distro. Openssl r0fl, uberpwnage for those who know what to do.
Yeah big fucking tree, but beyond the big project what we all know, the other smallones either dead, unsupported or noone uses them like zenwalk.
Since noone going to rely on a distro which not backed up by community, people just won’t use it, why would they?
This tree is stupid, it should rather start it from 2008 and only with the big distro names.