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by arp242 1122 days ago
I suppose so, but I don't think the effects will be all that large. And we can just as much blame the Rust Foundation people for putting out a trademark policy that's completely bonkers and more strict than almost any trademark policy (including those from Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) If you don't want people to take radical actions then don't do radical things.

Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably more.

2 comments

... LibreOffice, MariaDB, Openbox ... and if we consider forks of the community rather than raw code, we must also mention GNOME.
I don't think they really did much for their parent project though? They're just forks that are more successful than the parent, but that's a different thing. My point was mostly that forking doesn't need to be a zero-sum game and that everyone can benefit from it.
I believe the now-Oracle projects benefit significantly from code pushed to the forked versions.
> Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim

GCC had a standard to live up to (and it extended that standard in plenty of ways), the others aren't languages per se and do not and never did have the mission to appeal to the people that write non-sexy system software for a living. They value stability and a lack of drama in the suppliers of their tools above all else because any kind of fragmentation has the potential to cause them to have to (much) more work and they usually already have plenty of that.