[yk_42]

As I understand it (as a regular on the ZeroMQ and Crossroads mailing lists), the reasons are as follows:

1) Trademark issues - the original developers of ZMQ have been prohibited from using the ZeroMQ trademark and, thus, from making official releases.

2) The new ZeroMQ contribution policy[1], in which pull requests are merged without review and then later reverted/enhanced if necessary, is seen as incompatible with the goals of some of the lead developers. These developers prefer a more rigorous review policy.

There are more reasons, but from what I can tell, those are the main ones that haven't fully been covered here.

[1]: http://www.zeromq.org/docs:contributing (see "Philosophy").

[mato]

If you want more background to what led up to our fork of ZeroMQ, read the flamewar on zeromq-dev from February carefully hidden in a "C++ assertion" thread at http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2012-February/0..., or from http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2012-February/0... which relates directly to the trademark question.

[DennisP]

I noticed there's a compatibility library with 0mq. What are the technical changes that require a compatibility library?

This seems to imply there are API differences, rather than just the same code with different development policies going forward.

[obtu]

The compatibility configure flag seems to be used to also install the crossroads library as libzmq.so.