[os-engineering]FW: [os-infrastructure] Re: Model discussionboileddry(er)

[Joe Abbate]

Hi Andrew,

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Ross wrote:
> I understand this important difference in philosophy. It comes down to
> how strong "gravity" (the propensity to keep content integrating to the
> trunk) is. A key principle in open source has always been that forking
> code is bad. It's part of open source culture and cited in many research
> papers on open source as a source of strength. This is why I feel we
> should structure our environment/model to encourage integration.
>   

Allow me to quote Eric Raymond (as you know, author of The Cathedral and 
the Bazaar, but this is from the follow-on Homesteading the Noosphere):

"Nothing prevents half a dozen different people from taking any given 
open-source product (such as, say the Free Software Foundations's gcc C 
compiler), duplicating the sources, running off with them in different 
evolutionary directions, but all claiming to be /the/ product.

This kind of divergence is called a /fork/. The most important 
characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that 
cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community. 
(There are phenomena that look superficially like forking but are not, 
such as the proliferation of different Linux distributions. In these 
pseudo-forking cases there may be separate projects, but they use mostly 
common code and can benefit from each other's development efforts 
completely enough that they are neither technically nor sociologically a 
waste, and are not perceived as forks.)"

I believe that like Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat, an Ingres Community Edition 
is not a fork but a pseudo-fork. Community and Enterprise would use 
mostly common code and would definitely benefit from each other.

Joe