| > I have to disagree on this one. Multiple diverging projects create _Stability_, whereas a single project creates _fragility_. One bad step on the only project, and it will be all who suffer Anti-fragility is a lot more complicated then just having a lot of implementations. The moving away from CVS and SVN to much more easily distributed revision controls is one of the best things that ever happened to large open source projects. The reason for this is that when its very easy to loose contributors and users to forks then it enforces a lot of project management discipline on the part of the project leadership. Before when you held all the keys to the castle and it was difficult to move away it was very tempting for people to use their position to impose "political" restraints on other people. And vastly reduced hosting costs thanks to things like github, gitlab, spread of cloud providers and so on and so forth makes it now cheaper then ever before. And these things makes it easier to 'unfork' as well. In this way we have the odd result of easy forking has a way of making it so that forking isn't necessary. And when there is a major dispute in a particular community then cheap and easy forking (and recombining) means that people can actually have competing governance models and see which approach is actually better. Rather then just fighting until everybody gets burned out and abandons the project. Lede vs Openwrt is a good example of this. Libre Office vs Open Office. Gnome vs Unity. These things exist more due to competing governance models then anything else. So this can be summarized as saying "improvements in anti-fragility in modern large open source projects is more due to the fluidity in which projects can be managed, forked, and recombined rather then just the number of implementations users and contributors can choose from" |