

10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened - luckystrike
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=391

======
andyking
I'll tell you what's interesting. This blog. It's from a fairly unsexy uptime
monitoring company, whose services I've got little interest in. If the blog
was just company updates ("we've got a new server" or "20% off all packages
this week") it'd get very little traffic. But I've got it in my RSS reader and
it hits the social news sites every other day with well-written and often
humorous observations on tech.

Lots of people have heard of Pingdom who ordinarily wouldn't; it just goes to
show how a little effort making your website something more than just a
corporate website can go a long way.

~~~
pierrefar
Absolutely. And to ask the next question: how many people signed up (and paid)
for their service because they heard about it via the blog?

~~~
calvin
At least this one. I've been trialing it and am planning to sign up at the end
of the trial. The service works well.

------
pfedor
One interesting fork was egcs, forked from gcc in the 1990s, by people who
wanted to try out the "bazaar" development model (as opposed to the
"cathedral" model the FSF used, which meant very little engaging of the
community.) The experiment turned out very successful and eventually the egcs
version was named the one and true gcc (and the gcc we use today is a
derivative of it.)

------
ivey
Best line in the article, re: Carrier forking from Pidgin: "A fork (initially
called Funpidgin) was done of Pidgin 2.4.0 because there were disagreements
about the size of the text entry field."

~~~
benbeltran
Sometimes developers can be very childish and proud. Just make the damn thing
resizable or write a plugin or something.

------
pierrefar
Why not link to the projects being discussed. That's a lame oversight.

------
jacobscott
This article is interesting, but I think it is too shallow to get any deep
understanding of causes of forking as a phenomenon. A case study on /that/
would be kick ass, and quite a treat in terms of both software engineering
methodology and oss anthropology.

~~~
gaius
For example, it doesn't even mention that OpenBSD's priority is security and
NetBSD's is portability, and that _that_ is the reason for the fork.

------
pgebhard
Pretty good choices for the list. A bit of history and details, but only very
little analysis of why they forked.

~~~
jmtulloss
Eh, made for an easy read. I'm ok with it.

