Hello World,
I realize that I'm a Johnny-come-lately to the Nagios community, as the cur=
rent maintainer of DNX I see myself as somewhat connected to the debate, bu=
t frankly I don't have a pony in this race, so I hope that my opinion comes=
off as a concerned observer.
I've been following the Nagios is dead, lets make a fork thread, and while =
I commented heavily in the beginning, I've tapered off so I could take some=
time to think.
This is not by any measure the first time, all or part of a community have =
made the decision to fork, so lets take a look at some case studies of succ=
essful open source software, those that have forked and those that only sor=
t of have, and see what lessons we can learn from them.
The first one that comes to mind, and actually the one I think that forked =
for reasons closest to ours (I'm neither for nor against a fork, when I ref=
er to ours I refer simply to the matter at hand).
Mambo / Joomla
According to Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla.
Joomla was formed in 2005 in response to Mambo being trademarked and effect=
ively owned by a private corporation, Miro Intl Prvt Ltd.
This appears to have caused a great deal of stress within the community and=
most of the developers left to found opensourcematters and later Joomla, w=
hich oddly enough means "all together".
Joomla is inarguably a very successful project, and by all accounts is more=
well known and more widely adopted than Mambo at this stage.
That said Mambo still has a pretty strong following and most of the doomsay=
ers have at least thus far been proven wrong.
I call this a 50/50 amicable split, but the primary reason behind the fork =
was that the community or at least part of it felt disenfranchised when Mam=
bo made a change of licensing / ownership.
I think the lesson to learn from this is that it's very important to listen=
to the community, but the community also needs strong, involved leadership=
, whose primary interest is the further development of the product. I thin=
k history will show that this should probably be separate and apart from th=
e commercial interests of the product.
Now lets look at another example.
Compiere / Adempiere
Again according to Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adempiere
In September of 2006 Adempiere was founded due to a long standing disagreem=
ent between ComPiere Inc. and the community that sprung up around it.
The community believed that Compiere was placing too much emphasis on comme=
rcial development and had effectively closed the source by not improving on=
the public code base in quite sometime.
http://red1.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3D931
Now this in anecdotal, but I would say this split was not what I would call=
amicable, and most of the Compiere "Partners" that I worked with back in m=
y consulting days eventually dropped Compiere in favor of other solution(s).
Again it looks like the split occurred because the community felt ignored, =
there was very little feedback, no back and forth, very little if any devel=
opment in the publicly visible code base.
Adempiere appears to be growing, the community appears to be large and vibr=
ant and releases are taking place on a fairly regular basis.=20
Compiere on the other hand appears to be doing ok in spite of the fact that=
a large portion of it's community disappeared. This is partly because the=
primary users of Compiere are large enterprises that have heavily invested=
in Compiere infrastructure, and also partly because of the company has mov=
ed to a cloud based system that is more appealing to the small and medium s=
ized enterprises vs having to setup and install their own CRM/ERP solution.
So the outcome is one that appears to be mutually beneficial for all involv=
ed. The community got their "community developed CRM/ERP product", and Com=
piere gets to focus on their mostly commercial offering, while still mainta=
ining some of the warm fuzziness of open source.
Here is another example of a fork.
Mozilla / Firefox
According to Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox
...[email truncated]...
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