“Can we please get over our collective forkaphobia? Every
few weeks something happens in the Linux landscape, such as the
recent news that the Samba project is undergoing a planned fork, or
some pseudo-technical pseudo-journalist decides to take a shot at
Linux by dragging this old red herring into the conversation, and
we have to endure yet another round of angst and debate over
whether Linux will smithereen itself all over the landscape. It’s
pointless, and it’s lost whatever entertainment value it had a long
time ago.”
“I make this plea for several reasons. First and foremost, if
there’s one OS that’s likely to avoid self-immolation via forking,
it’s Linux. Why? Simple: Everyone of any importance or influence in
the Linux development community whatsoever is painfully aware of
how close UNIX came to making itself a historical footnote thanks
to fragmentation. If anything, the scaremongers howling in the
night about Linux’s potential for forking are helping to educate
the newer members of the community about the danger, and therefore
reducing even further the chances of it happening. The bottom line
is that Linux crowd just won’t make UNIX’s mistake. Besides,
staying united against the Evil Redmond Empire is ever so much more
fun than spending countless hours spinning off your own
not-quite-compatible version of Linux.”