Weak Communities and Strong Forks

“Proprietary vendors sometimes point to the possibility of
open-source fragmentation as one of its great weaknesses believing,
as they do, that the vendor should always control its own destiny.
What such vendors fail to see is that a community’s right to fork a
project is actually its greatest strength. The fork is the
community’s most valuable tool for ensuring the ongoing health of
the project.

“OpenOffice.org is feeling this now, as a cumbersome community
process has led prominent members of the OpenOffice community to
lay down the law (er… the fork) and declare independence, as
Kohei Yoshida does…”

Complete
Story