>make art - a week dedicated to the world of Free Software and digital art >organised by goto10 ... >This year make art focusses on distributed and open practices in FLOSS art. >What the fork?! is about decentralization. Forking is the new black. Work >from one source, copy, patch, improve, experiment, change direction, >inspire! Forking is not about quick hacks, but about creating room to >experiment, letting go of the one working copy and creating a multiplicity >of ideas.
i kind of find this irritating, it seem to be suggesting people fork projects just for the hell of it - let's do all those things the original developers never wanted their projects to be - and remember, most open source projects start out because the developer(s) had like-minded goals as the above goals state. i think forking of an open source project is generally not taken lightly and is seen as a last resort when disputes/disagreements between developers of the project cannot be resolved in any other way. i'd be interested to know what kind of projects are intended to be forked, or more precisely what complexity/size? there's no point in forking a big project to just add a handful of experimental or idiosyncratic features. however, while i'm a little critical of "what the fork!" the project i forked (gfract to create gkII*) a few years ago was because i patched, improved (arguable), experimented (definitely), and changed direction. in my case, i was never a developer of the project i forked. when I forked gfract and formed gkII, my contact with the author of gfract resulted in the update of his code (ie from GTK, to GTK2), and he also developed what in his opinion was a better implementation of part of the user interface i had developed in my experiments. There were also features he simply disliked, and he then implemented in ways I disliked. But in this case it was all quite friendly and we simply wanted to do things differently, and he also had more important things to work on. james. * http://www.jwm-art.net/gkII currently does not compile unless you remove -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED from the Makefile. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
