@mgorny but isn't this the special super power of FLOSS?

Fork and go on with your life?
They seem to have gone through some ego fight, where they could have just split and made their own forks.

Of course once you fork, you find out how really important your work is. Maybe we are more afraid to learn that more than other things.

@ark74, no, it's not. That's the brainrot #GitHub is spreading.

The power of #FLOSS is the community. It's about people working together to create a better world.

The "fork and forget" ideology doesn't help people. Competition is killing volunteer-run projects. The "prize" isn't worth it.

How does the user benefit from having half a dozen incomplete forks, requires and reboots? In the best case, they waste their energy and find one that suits them best. And then hope it'll be up-to-date on #security fixes, and that it won't be abandoned in a few months.

Because when it is, you need to waste your energy finding and transitioning to another fork. Or maybe forking the fork to keep it alive. Before you know it, there is no community and no users; just a bunch of developers maintaining their duplicate software stacks full-time.

Downstream this is a nightmare. You suddenly need to figure out what to do when a dozen packages require different forks of the same thing, most of them mutually exclusive and some incompatible by design. And if you find a vulnerability and want to be a good guy, you now need to figure the dozen different projects to report it to.

The only people benefiting from this are #BigTech companies. They have the resources to follow these forks, copy their work and sell it as a working product. Maybe even #OpenSource, but with all the strings.

#FreeSoftware

@mgorny @ark74

A community's survival depends on being VERY GOOD at knowing when to break ties and when to keep hashing it out.

A big problem in our culture today is people just ghosting each other at the smallest inconvenience (while simultaneously sticking with the worst possible jerks, for some damned reason).