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A Tale of Two ForksWhile I was writing last Friday's editor's note, "Linux Should Copy Amiga", I kept thinking what a different story it would have been if Amiga had been released under a Free Software license. I'm sure I'm not the only one with that thought. Then I ran across osCommerce is Dead: Long Live the NEW osCommerce Project. While the circumstances are different, this is also a story of a software project in trouble. But it has a different ending, because osCommerce is licensed under the GPL. osCommerce has been very successful, and reportedly is used by over 200,000 online stores. Despite its success, it has been plagued by problems:
Long-time development team member Rhea Anthony apparently felt that investing further energy in the existing project was not going to work out, so she built her own team and forked osCommerce; the new project is called The osCommerce Project. Contrast that with the poor old AmigaOS: once upon a time it was revolutionary, and it still has a large devoted following. But development stalled because it lost funding, and ownership of the code came under dispute, and is still unresolved. Hyperion Entertainment and Amiga, Inc. both claim to be working on Amiga 4.0, but who knows if it will ever be released. Or if it will be relevant, or comparable to other modern operating systems after all this time. A lesson in how the freedom to fork, and to release your modifications, is powerful protection from lock-in and obsolescence. ReferencesA history of the Amiga, part 7: Game on!, with links to the first six parts.
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