It turns out that I've been a bad, bad man and haven't done my duty...

At some point in the distant past, some people came up with doing a PHP Advent Calendar.  I don't know who and I don't know when, but I know that the security-guy Chris Shiflett and Canadian-guy Sean Coates are the Editors-in-Chiefs this year.

Yesterday I noted how good and useful forks in Open Source Projects could be.  Well, it turns out I was horribly wrong and I'm using this space to admit it:

Forks are the highest order of evil and a plague on our society.

First, it's a way to divide the attention of the community.  Instead of having a single project/effort to watch, the community has to evaluate both and figure out which one works for them.  If there are feature differences - or module support differences - they'll have to figure out which ones do or don't work... or worse, which ones partially work.

At php|works last month, Jay Pipes had the closing keynote where he talked about forks in reference to Open Source Projects... just to (not!) go out on a limb here and say:  I agree!

There are a variety of reasons that it makes sense to have - and sometimes actively encourage - forks...

First, it's a way to inject new life into a project.  There are many Open Source Projects which are out there with a handful of commits and almost no activity... or worse, there are even more that move quickly for a while and then crumble into nothing.  The couple of people that come together to work on the release don't ever pull it together and actually make that release.  

Since 2001 or so (according to SourceForge) when I got involved in Open Source, I've joined a handful of projects and had roles varying from a general advisor/reviewer to Core Developer to Newbie Wrangler. Yes, that last one was an actual title. But the interesting thing is that I've never started an Open Source Project myself. I've worked with projects that were established, already had communities (some quite small), and already had some structure in place. Recently, a number of opportunities have come to light and one of the interesting ones - but not the most interesting one - involves preparing a small application for release as Open Source... so I find myself considering and evaluating what it would take.

First, I'm a firm believer in that it must be useful now. As great as SourceForge is, I'm not willing to add yet another project that has a grand vision that doesn't do anything. That said, it doesn't need to be perfect. I don't think the application needs to do everything and fully encompass the entire vision in the first release... but it needs to do something useful immediately.

In the various Open Source communities in which I participate, Microsoft is always taken as this large looming figure lurking and waiting. Or its portrayed as this enemy at the gates - not pun intended - waiting to get in and destroy us all. As Tom Adelstein pointed out over the weekend:

Indulge if you will in recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images experienced as intrusive and distressing. The obsession with Microsoft in Open Software communities is excessive and unreasonable and a product of the mind. My only hope is that such thoughts, impulses, and, or images can be expunged by logic or reasoning, which is contrary to the notions in the psychiatric community.

[snip]

Redmond? So what. Let them do what they do. We need to do something other than write about all their transgressions - real or imagined.

To say this another way:

Get over yourself. We have enough problems of our own without imaging more.

I've talked about the two facets of the Open Source Community before, a quick summary of that one is:

First, you have the "Free Software" crowd. This segment of the community is based on the concept that "all software should be free". They actively work to further this goal via licenses and practices which encourage source code to be opened up and made available to others.

[snip]

Second, you have the "Open Source" crowd who believe that the OSS community provides real value to people and businesses for a fraction of the cost of the alternatives. Therefore, it's in their and the community's best interest to continue making contributions and improve the underlying infrastructure.

From this CSC report from 2004 (horribly dated, but interesting nonetheless), it shows that businesses accepted Linux, et al, into their application stacks years ago. Most of them didn't get into Open Source for a political or ideological agenda, they got involved because it made sense.