[zkhalique]

I think the intersection of politics and internet is interesting. I write about it quite a bit on my blog, as well as here: http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...

In this case, we see sort of an "arab spring" of open source projects lately. Consider MySQL after it was bought by Oracle, and then the MariaDB fork was born. Now we have Node.js and Docker being forked. Until now, most successful communities have been monarchies or oligarchies, whether it was Linux or Python. Corporate sponsorship played a big role. But if more headless or democratic communities succeed, it will be interesting to watch. PHP is an example of a more headless community, and it used to be all over the place.

There are two ways politics and internet interact. One way is how the tools we use affect our society in meatspace and the other is how we organize online in cyberspace.

[kibwen]

Rocket actually isn't a fork of Docker. From https://coreos.com/blog/rocket/ :

  > Why not just fork Docker?

  > From a security and composability perspective, the 
  > Docker process model - where everything runs through a 
  > central daemon - is fundamentally flawed. To “fix” 
  > Docker would essentially mean a rewrite of the project, 
  > while inheriting all the baggage of the existing 
  > implementation.

[hbbio]

Docker is not being forked. CoreOS (which is another company, not a "democratic community") is launching a competing project: Rocket, and tries to leverage the popularity of Docker for that.

[curun1r]

There is a point to be made about Docker, even though it hasn't been forked. The prevailing sentiment in yesterday's thread about the new Docker announcements was one of worry over whether it was too much of a land grab by the people at Docker, Inc and whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology but will almost certainly do so at some point in the future.

But what were seeing with Node along with the other examples from the post you're replying to is that so long as the source is freely available, the core developers and the community is what's important. There was a quote in yesterday's thread that 95% of Docker contributors don't work for Docker, Inc. This means that Docker, Inc will need to walk a tightrope between over-monetizing their platform, pissing off the 95% of contributors from outside Docker, Inc and under-monetizing it, pissing off their investors. If they try things that lock people into the platform and force them to pay for other Docker products, you'll see the developer community rebel with an actual fork of the Docker codebase. This is exactly what we're seeing here with Node...Joyent's stewardship of the project is being seen as lacking and the people who are really important, the core developers and the community are taking a proactive step to remedy that.

It think we're nowhere near the point where this will happen to Docker, but this should be an object lesson for Docker, Inc about what can happen if they try to push too much of the Docker, Inc agenda into Docker, the open source project.

[vampirechicken]

> whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology

We trusted free software for a long time before we needed to call it open source to make it sound palatable to less visionary business leaders.

We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.

[coldtea]

>We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.

If they aren't volunteers doing it for fun, though, they wont, unless someone pays them.

And even some very popular FOSS projects millions of people use have just one or two overworked maintainers and not much in the way of funding or contributions.

So FOSS is no magic bullet "as long as the code is open and there are users the project will be worked on".

[sixdimensional]

I could not agree more. But then again, I'm biased, as I wrote my senior thesis in organizational studies on the subject of the politics of information technology, in college in 2003 (and still have yet to publish it online somewhere!).

I think the most interesting aspect of this is the cross-disciplinary nature, when analyzing something like the Internet and information technology through the lens of a different field, politics. The way politics presents itself and interacts in this field (much like other fields) is a whole area of study itself.

[pickpuck]

Please post it. :)

[debacle]

This is more about how, for many companies, the OSS doctrine that they espouse doesn't really jive with their need for profitability.

In the long run, they need to make decisions for the company that are not in the best interest of the project, and either the project dies or is forked or abandoned.

Sun did really well by the OSS community for a very long time, but they had nothing to show for it and Oracle has since foisted a lot of their efforts on to the ASF. LibreOffice, hhvm, Mint, just to name a few, have all come about because the companies responsible for the stewardship of a project weren't doing their duty in the eyes of the community. I honestly think we're going to see a Firefox fork in the next 2-3 years.

It's just the nature of OSS and while it means that, long-term, fewer companies will invest in the space, the companies that do invest will do it for the right reasons.

[random28345]

> I honestly think we're going to see a Firefox fork in the next 2-3 years.

Who is going to fork it? The active contributors that are employed by the Mozilla Foundation? Google? Microsoft? Opera? Some currently peripherally involved third party?

And what will the goals of this fork be? To be more focused on something other than producing a standards-compliant, multi-platform, performant browser?

[dragonwriter]

> I honestly think we're going to see a Firefox fork in the next 2-3 years.

There are already semi-forks (downstream distributions that continue to pull from upstream and are mostly synced, but also maintain distinct and divergent feature sets) -- both GNU IceCat is an example (Debian Iceweasel I think is less so, because IIRC it is synced but for branding with upstream.)

[bhouston]

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ as well -- a 64 bit version.

[kibwen]

And another, Pale Moon: http://www.palemoon.org/

[netcan]

An interesting intersection might be continuity. A big problem with dictatorships is succession. If a project relies on a leader as much as many do, can the project outlive them (or at least their desire to lead it).