"According to one theory of history, in the right circumstances,
certain developments are inevitable. Given a few decades of an
industrial revolution, half a dozen people will invent the steam
engine. Given a few decades of biological studies, and theories of
evolution start to emerge. If that is so, then for the last year or
so in the history of the free and open source software community we
have been in Forking Time -- and for the life of me, I can't decide
whether this is a healthy development or not.
"Certainly, there have been no shortages of recent forks
although they do not always go by that name. In fact, those
involved in forks often go to great lengths to deny that they are
forking, perhaps to avoid being stigmatized as argumentative and
uncooperative.
"MySQL alone has had at least four forks (Percona, Our Delta,
MariaDB, and Drizzle). Recently, LibreOffice, an offshoot of
OpenOffice.org, was announced. So was Trinity KDE, which exists to
continue development of the KDE 3 release series rather than
working with the current KDE 4 series. Ubuntu's innovations on the
GNOME desktop are also looking increasingly like a fork, since they
are not being contributed (or, perhaps, accepted) into the main
GNOME project."
