Comments on: 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened

By: Interesting Reading… – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks

Interesting Reading… – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:28:27 +0000

[...] 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened – “Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place…” [...]

By: evil1dwk

evil1dwk — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:55:37 +0000

What about vnc and it’s many variants? ORL (Olivetti & Oracle Research Lab) was bought out by AT&T. AT&T closed the lab which developed VNC. Some of the developers from AT&T left and started RealVNC. Now RealVNC has multiple forks (tightVNC, UltraVNC, etc).

By: SSS

SSS — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:39:57 +0000

COMPIZ > BERYL > COMPIZ

By: walter rutka

walter rutka — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:47:19 +0000

do these projects inherantly have a patching system?
i am not use to this mentality.
i am not saying its correct , however do you put a patch application
at the top priority? i remember downloading dll’s and exe’s at one
time but a patch to the applications doesn’t sound that safe.
maybe i am just stuck reading about patchs so often i need to get
away from it for awhile!?
does anybody go onsite anymore.
walk around a assess a clients needs?

By: Rathann

Rathann — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:03:04 +0000

Maybe not as high-profile as the top 10, but important nonetheless:

libdvdread and libdvdnav
What: libraries for accessing DVDs
When: April 2007
Why: Upstream has become unresponsive, basically dead. Some developers from MPlayer took created a fork to fix long-standing bugs and add improvements.

By: Shulai

Shulai — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 01:20:23 +0000

@drew: Gnome is not a fork of KDE. Gnome started from scratch using C language and the (C based) GTK+ because their developers felt KDE wasn’t free enough as it was based on the Qt toolkit (C++ based and therefore KDE is written in C++ too).
But they didn’t shared a single line of code (besides external libraries)

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 12:34:20 +0000

Go-oo is interesting fork from OpenOffice

It is faster, looks better, has more functions and compatibilities with more document formats.

By: Rajeev Kumar

Rajeev Kumar — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:30:19 +0000

it is really nice to know that today oss is driving innovation

By: tommy higbee

tommy higbee — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:35:03 +0000

Ubuntu is not really a fork of Debian. They didn’t copy Debian and then start developing their own version. One of Debian’s design goals is to allow people to build distributions on top of Debian, just like Ubuntu does. You can’t really call it a fork if Ubuntu is using Debian as it was designed to be used.

It is similar to a fork, in that they take Debian packages and modify them. But even if you call that a fork, then each release of Ubuntu is a separate fork of Debian, because each Ubuntu release goes back to Debian packages.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:42:03 +0000

Thanks for mentioning that Callweaver forked from Asterisk, it looks like they are doing some interesting things with the code… worth a look at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/OpenPBX.org%20FAQ