this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Damn.
I absolutely hate open source drama. I don't want to read your diary when I use your software, I want it to work.
I'm not even against running a parallel for-profit for extra features or corporate sponsorships. People gotta eat. I'd much rather have that than deal with following sob stories about ruthless leadership, ego clashes in contributors and endless forking because everybody thinks everybody else sucks.
The more I hang out around here, where OSS is a bit of a religion, the more disenchanted I am with it and the more I think the big game changer for this space is getting contributions on usability, production and business rather than code.
What you call drama is a healthy community fighting against violated principles. So, according to you, what's the alternative? Just keep working with broken principles and never complain? Allow a bunch of greedy members to take over the project?
If you have paid attention, basically community always win: libreoffice vs openoffice, mariadb over mysql, jenkins over hudson, x.org over xfree86, ffmpeg over libav, nextcloud over owncloud, etc.
Right to fork is one of the most important to keep project in community hands and follow declared principles. Some forget that and are just doomed to repeat the history.
Disclaimer: I work on iDempiere who forked adempiere because of community disagreements, which also forked from compiere because of corporative takeout.
Long live to CoMaps!
Well, the point is I don't want CoMaps to win out over Organic Maps, I want some open source alternative to win out over Google Maps. Which is why I'd hesitate to say that LibreOffice "won" over anything, Google and Microsoft seem to be doing most of the winning in that particular space.
In a healthy community public arguments about "violated principles" wouldn't be a frequent occurrence and wouldn't lead to atomization of projects. I'm not taking sides on this particular example (mostly because I can't be bothered to look up the drama). But I am saying that besides the confusion and negativity caused by seeing open source developers constantly bicker about their violated principles, it can be a major setback for the perception of reliability of open source software overall. For an app you install that mostly works no matter what it's one thing, but if you integrate a piece of software into a workflow and it suddenly spawns two different pieces of software with different splinters of the original team that can be a significant disruption and if you fear significant disruptions you may hesitate to rely on that particular thing in the first place.
So do I think there shouldn't be a right to fork? Not at all. That's the whole point of open source.
Do I think it's overall a negative for the open source ecosystem that major projects break up due to their contributors being unable to come to a decision about the direction of the project? Absolutely.
You have some points but I think you're overexposed to forks and drama by being in these communities. Most OSS works and steadily improves and becomes a reliable tool. Closed software often gets better but often gets worse with bloat, subscription models, etc. I think that closed software does more harm to the utility and reliability of their products than open software.
A streamer using OBS doesn't worry about drama or forks, but they know they have to switch to Windows 11 with new hardware requirements and ads built in. A commuter using the Transit app (OSM map data) doesn't care about where the maps came from, but they know when the app has a bug, they have nowhere to turn to get it fixed. A 3D animator sees Blender steadily improve and knows if they switch to Adobe, they'll have to pay increasingly high subscription costs to keep using it. Any individual project is not forking all the time. You just know about it when it happens to any project, whether you use the software or not.
You're not wrong, but I think it isn't a linear relation. It's probably small projects having a lot of infighting and then it tapers off as it grows, and then it probably spikes again as it gets too big to handle as a small group but big enough that people in the group disagree and then tapers off again once it becomes a staple or so big it has some foundation or company attached to it.
I guess my worry, overexposure aside, is for the fizzy awkward transition bits in there impacting the perception of the whole thing, but while Organic was pretty big it's still true that the vast majority of people have no idea it exists.
Well, I don't know the specific case about CoMaps, but forking is a really hard decision, and you need to have strong backup from community to dare going that way. I would assume when projects decide to split is because all the attempts to arrive to a good decision failed. Driving a fork for success is a very hard task, and I guess the majority of forks that fail (a lot) are because they didn't have support from community.
About libreoffice winning over m$ or g$ ? Well, I also would like to see that happening, but not to be replaced by another non-FOSS or half-FOSS option.
I would absolutely take "half-FOSS", if we are thinking of the same thing. Pretty consistently the most robust, reliable, expansive FOSS projects have some foundation taking corporate sponsors or a for-profit arm providing ancillary services and I have few issues with those (less with the first than with the second). I mean, FOSS developers should be paid a salary. If that means you are backed by a significant chunk of an industry like Blender or have a for-profit arm that runs a business on the side like Home Assistant, I would much rather have that than... you know, Microsoft Office. Your mileage may vary.