DOOOMED I TELL U
(Welcome to code fork country, now passing XEmacs, Vim, and XServer)
What kind of lame name is Flock anyway?
Eh? What fork? This is just somebody taking another project and producing a more refined version with a more narrow focus. As I recall, isn’t that what Firefox once was to the Mozilla codebase?
Flock you!
Eh? What fork? This is just somebody taking another project and producing a more refined version with a more narrow focus. As I recall, isn’t that what Firefox once was to the Mozilla codebase?[/quote]
Yeah, and we all know that when they made Firefox instead of just Mozilla, it was a disaster.
Also, from the one paragraph /. article kun linked:
On his blog this week he says Flock won’t be forking the Firefox codebase.
The problem occurs when the base code for the new project diverges to the point where it is no longer compatible with the originating source code and duplicates similar new feature or redesign efforts continuously. As long as Flock can stay within their goal of not forking, fine and dandy, but this is exactly how XEmacs was started (more features for GUI built in, Emacs mainline also is under a different license). You may end up with a license SNAFU situation as well, because their enhancements will not all be contributed back to Firefox (read the articles please)-- this means that you will end up with a dual license product like LGPL/BSD or something and it probably won’t be distributed on any strict systems like Debian.
I don’t see what’s so horrible about this. Anyone who’s running Debian should be able to install the damned thing from source if they want it that bad, but even if they can’t, I’m sure a binary will turn up on some third-party apt repository. Also, I don’t see it detracting from Firefox in any event, which I plan to continue using. So what’s the problem?
I’m just saying that if it forks the project then you end up with less resources dedicated to either project, as people move from one to the other, and they spend the same amount of time on similar tasks with zero re-use. Debian contributers will not contribute to the non GPL project, and commercial people will probably gravitate towards the BSD licensed one, causing a polarization of dwindling resources.
By the way, in case you didn’t notice the topic was started with semi-joking intentions.
Bah, you know you’ve been coding too long when you instinctively think of the file locking function “flock()”.
- Alan