On forking and contributor agreements

TalkBack 1 of 1:

Thread View
Flat View

A brief history of wasting time.: FireFox is an example of a successful fork. The story is indicative of both what makes for a successful fork and the underlying principles of open source.

Once upon a time, Netscape was in severe financial difficulty, and could not afford to create a new version of its browser. So the company made a typical desperation move and released the code, hoping to obtain volunteer labor to replace paid staff.

The project attempted to improve Netscape's code for a long time and found it could not make progress. And so the participants decided to start from the beginning.

Netscape couldn't wait, and died. The remains were bought by AOL Time Warner, as it was, probably with the expectation of regaining the company's money by suing Microsoft. The eventual settlement was $900 million.

The effort to write a new browser continued, lengthily. AOL Timne Warner made an arrangement to obtain and adapt the product, reminiscent of Sun and OpenOffice, gave the project some money and resources, wished it luck, and turned it loose.

The project began to run out of resources and withered. But then Nokia returned the project to its roots by offering a contribution if it would produce a small browser that would allow Nokia to reduce payments to Opera and to its own staff.

A browser was finally produced, but it was bloated. FireFox was a fork intended to remove all the connections to other software functionality, to take on IE only, rather than all of Office. The fork soon proved so popular that it was able to eliminate Opera's chances of holding a significant share of the overall browser market.

FireFox may not have had a benign effect on employment in the software industry, and the hopes of both Netscape and Time Warner have long been extinguished, but FireFox does exist as the foremost example of the project's efforts.

So concludes the tale of an exemplary fork.; Posted by: Anton Philidor Posted on: 10/14/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use