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by munificent 2884 days ago
> If that decision really turns out to be so bad then it will be forked and a wiser leader(s) will have their shot at decision making.

No, that doesn't work in practice. The network effects are so insanely dominant in open source projects that forks are nowhere near an efficient market.
4 comments
stcredzero 2884 days ago
The network effects are so insanely dominant in open source projects that forks are nowhere near an efficient market.

The market doesn't have to be anywhere near efficient. It just has to allow any escape whatsoever from a death-march/death spiral.

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nicpottier 2884 days ago
Open Source is absolutely chock full of examples of this.
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munificent 2884 days ago
That's survivorshop bias. Yes, occasionally a fork takes over. It very rarely succeeds and usually only in cases where the original is so toxic that it cancels out its own network effects. node.js is a good example of that. And then even there note how they eventually unforked.
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jessaustin 2884 days ago
It is really uncharitable to describe the node fork as "so toxic". People disagreed, but there's nothing wrong with that. I felt like the subsequent "merge" happened fairly quickly and with minimal drama.

Also this seems like a misuse of the term "survivorship bias". You claimed upthread that forks don't work because of network effects. The response was "some forks work". That is a direct refutation, no matter what the percentages are. Besides, you're misunderstanding the varied purposes of forks. I have several forks right now, not because I hate the original maintainers but because it was convenient to change a small thing for my own purposes. Whether or not upstream eventually agrees with me, my fork "works" perfectly well.

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ansible 2884 days ago
And sometimes the new community wins out over the existing one. LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, X.org vs. XFree86, etc.
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geodel 2884 days ago
Libreoffice vs Openoffice, Hudson vs Jenkins, and there would be so many more.
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weberc2 2883 days ago
Like the OP mentions in another comment, this is survivorship bias.
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Vendan 2884 days ago
It has literally happened before. Look into the node.js/io.js fork.
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