Linux: Fighting the FUD of Forking

sebFlyte writes "Fighting the MS FUD machine is a full time job for some open source developers, especially now Microsoft have thrown in the issue of the possibility of Linux forking (as Unix did)... it would also seem that Gates has moved on from telling people to 'get the facts' and creating FUD around patents and IP to criticising the open source communty's ability to create interoperable software."

Linux Forking is inevitable

[Dagny Taggert]

Forking is inevitable, especially since there is now large corporate (IBM, Novell, etc.) money involved. Linux is highly flexible and, since it's open source, customization of even the kernal is inevitable.

This is NOT a bad thing IMHO. It will just take some getting used to and require knowledge of the changes.

Linux forked a long time ago

[castlec]

Each distribution has typically has its own fork. The glory of the GPL rings true here. No one can be hurt from a fork. The better code, how ever one wishes to evaluate better, will live on. As others have already noted, "Nothing to see here. Move along."

Re:Microsoft and Interoperability ?

[Daengbo]

From the article, you'll see that "interoperability" here means with itself. Meaning: Windows works best with windows and other OSs don't work as well with it. This is somewhat true, but OSS's strength is operating with every OS and every arch under the sun...

This all goes hand-in-hand with Samba's impending complaint over MS's licensing agreement in the EU dispute.

Ummm... I don't see how or why

[agraupe]

I think he's trying to make the point that someone could make a fork that is incompatible with all linux programs, or something like that. It doesn't make sense to me, because such a product would only be the result of its creators having a strong urge to shoot themselves in the foot.

The "linux won't split" article said it best

[mrjb]

The whole nature of open source is based on interoperability. It is this very nature that made the Internet possible. Where standards are nonexistent, they are being created; for instance, look at the Jack Audio Connection Kit that allows all Linux audio applications (that support it) to interconnect. As a result, developers do not keep reinventing the wheel all the time; instead, they learn how to work with the provided interface, and just build what does not exist yet.

Forking desktop Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, when we start talking about entire Linux installs, and not just the kernel, wouldn't KDE and Gnome and (Others) count as forks? Yeah, they might be interface forks, but they each have their own software packages, configuration, etc. Yeah, KDE software will run on a Gnome desktop if the KDE libs are installed and vice versa, but that isn't really highly integrated is it?

And for software where money is made by having supporting services, etc, instead of the software itself, the incentive to create easy to use but still powerful software isn't very high - that'd mean less people buying support and help!

Re:Microsoft and Interoperability ?

[tomhudson]

Their strange view on interoperability:

For example, interoperability is sometimes viewed merely as adherence to a published specification of some kind, either from one or more vendors or a standards organization. But simply publishing a specification may not be enough, because it overlooks much of the hard work it takes to successfully develop interoperable products – namely, ensuring that the "contract" defined by a specification is successfully implemented in software and tested in a production environment.

No wonder they're always breaking specs.

The whole article is a puff piece. Even the above-quoted sentence really doesn't say anything.

But I do have to admit Microsoft is way ahead on interoperability - many more viruses and trojans "just work" with their systems.

Anyone who believes this mindless pap deserves what they get.

Slashdot helping to spread the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't Slashdot be one of the first to stop spreading Microsoft's FUD? The less attention it gets, the less effective it will be.

Personally, I'm getting sick of seeying these 'Microsoft accuses competetition of being worse then them!' articles.

Fud Fighters

[breakbeatninja]

I think it's important to recognize that Microsoft, SCO and other like minded companies will do whatever it takes to distribute harmful and baseless propaganda in order to further their cause (monopolization of desktop and server markets, proprietization of media and so on). The fact is, while each distribution has minor differences in the way userland and package management is iemplemented, the fundamental Linux kernel is the same and works across all of the distributions.

As we've seen in previous anti-Linux efforts on Microsoft's part, this is another effort to steer current Microsoft users away from Linux that may be considering it to lower licensing fees and hardware overhead. We all know it takes a *lot* more sysadmin time and monetary investment in hardware and software to reach the same results with a Microsoft-based workstation or server vs. a Linux or Unix equivelent. While Microsoft's sales are strong, their propaganda efforts show some desperation and fear.

While open source developers may spend a lot of time battling Microsoft's rhetoric, I think it's more important to concentrate on creating a solid operating system for everyone, from the hobbiest to the corporate user. The best way to beat Microsoft at its own game is not to play it. That is, Microsoft seems to value marketing and scare tactics over actual development and innovation. Let's not let Linux fall in Microsoft's trap of smoke and mirrors.

Re:The "linux won't split" article said it best

[bender_zero]

Sure, and how many pro audio apps are there yet? It's nice to have a good framework, but let's see it put to good use.

MS fails to grasp a simple idea once again

[Weaselmancer]

The reason why forking isn't a problem is because the open source community knows how to read the friggin' RFCs before we code something. Unlike a certain software giant who lives in Redmond.

Doesn't matter if there is one branch of a big project or 1000 forks. If they stick to specs, they are all interchangeable. Like your window manager. As long as they do what they're supposed to do, stick to specs and play fair - it doesn't matter which one you use.

This gives the user choice, which is why MS finds it to be such an alien concept.

There are 2 types of forking

[Xpilot]

The first kind is where each version of the software is slightly different, yet ABI compatible with one another. That's what the Linux kernel is, and Linus and co. have tried hard to maintain this. In essence, every time a developer sets up his own tree, it's a "fork" of the Linux kernel, but that's ok because binary compatibility is still maintained, and those changes will probably be merged back upstream anyway. Good news all round.

The second kind is where a substantial group of developers get into a messy political argument and take the codebase in a wildly different direction and becomes a new project in itself. This isn't necessarily a bad thing either, as you'll see cross-pollination between projects (like in the BSD's). However this may be what the FUD-mongerers are hinting at. I have yet to see any signs that this will happen though - it's downright impractical to fork the Linux kernel in a wildly incompatible fashion with the rest of the developer community - for one thing, there's a whole shitload of drivers you now have to maintain yourself. Not an easy job.

As for distros being different...well it's always been this way. Yet Linux's growth has been phenomenal, and with efforts like the LSB in place you won't find that distros diverge too far from one another.

Things look bright for Linux, any way you go. Don't listen to the FUD mongerers.

Re:Just like politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there is the Linux Standards Base, that has defined standard aspects for Linux and many of the distributions adhere to some amount of this.

But really, installing Linux and applications is a lot easier than installing Windows XP and applications, certainly in terms of time to install and not needing reboots, etc.

You just get a Linux distro, one of the big name ones if you don't want to do much work and need to know that there'll be online help. For example, Suse or Mandrake. Install it. Done.

Re:Just like politics

[grozzie2]

Win 95, Win 98, WinNT, Win2K, WinXp. Looks like a hell of a lot of incompatible forking to me....

frame the issue

[stallard]

You know, I've started to noticed a very strong similarity between the open source movement and the progressive political movement. Both tend to just react to attacts, are not proactive, and faile to frame the debate into their own words. Thankfully for politics, the progressive movement has picked up on this and is working to change it. The open source folk can learn a thing or two from this. However, issue framing is a bit too complex for a comment post so I recommend that all of you go out and read "Don't Think of an Elephant!" by George Lakoff. Yes it's a politically motivated book, but it's the best place to learn issue framing that I know of. Perhaps I'll get off my lazy ass sometime soon and come up with something for slashdot readers.

Distribution forks are killing Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the forks. It is the install procedure that each fork will require to run the same piece of software.

With windows, you download a program and double click the install button. It doesn't matter if you are running Windows 98 / ME, NT, 2K, or XP. The thing installs and (sometimes) suns correctly. Try downloading a package (NOT SOURCE) built for some old version of RedHat and installing it on a new Slackware distribution. It just plain does not work by default.

This is what Bill G was talking about and I agree with him. There is no "standard" in the distribution. Where should the program go when it gets installed and does the distribution that it is getting run on grant the required privileges to install it there by default?

The Linux community needs to agree on a few things, one of the basics would be userland programs and config scripts. Until then it will continue to be it's own worst enemy as people won't be able to call themselves Linux admins, they will only be able to call themselves Distribution admins.

Re:Microsoft forks too

[TheRaven64]

This is exactly the opposite of a fork. They took two codebases (the DOS-based 9x and the NT kernel), and gradually shared more and more code between them until they could ditch the 9x kernel and run all userland stuff on the NT kernel, as well as providing binary device driver compatibility between the later versions of both branches (WDM). It is not a fork, since the NT and DOS branches did not start off with a shared code base.

Why Fight FUD?

[md17]

I can't understand why Linux and F/OSS zealots waste time fighting FUD. It seems like a waste to me. All the time that is spent playing politics could be spent improving software and fighting FUD with the truth... Better software. Any person with half a brain knows that Microsoft, Sun, insert any corporation, will lie (or stretch the truth) in order to make their stuff look better than their competitors. So why fight it? IMHO there are many other more important battles to fight... Like better F/OSS software, better documentation, software patents, etc. It's weird how politics has this way of sucking people in. My self included.

Linux FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is not targeted as 'evil corporate product' like MS because there is not a single person/corporation to target.

The default assumption that Linux sources is available and can be modified for each environment is FUD since a multi-million dollar software/hardware installation will not be able to have downtime in months or years whilst the linux source is being fixed to meet their buisness needs.

Re:Distribution forks are killing Linux

[Zphbeeblbrox]

I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you here. There is already a "standard" of sorts. /etc will work when nothing else will. /usr/bin also will work when nothing else will. The real problem here is that the developers of applications pretty much leave this kind of thing up to the distributions. If developers took the time to come up with one click installs for their apps then people might not be so dependent on the distro's The distribution should not be responsible for solving the install issues for their apps. That is the developers problem. When Gnome or KDE offer a one click install for their product then standardization will come. Until then each distribution will continue to offer their own "unique" way of doing things.

Forking is aweful.

[Phat_Tony]

I think he knows what he's talking about here, forking is really awful. Over and over again, I've seen people with NT or 95 buying games that only run under 2000 or XP, or the newer forks like 98, ME, XP, or 2000 failing to run software from the older forks like NT, 95, or 3.1. One of my nephew's favorite games under 95 wouldn't even run under 98. It's really confusing for customers too, especially now that there are things that still say "Windows" like CE, but that run entirely different and mostly incompatible software. My Mom ran NT, and several times bought software that wouldn't work on that fork, which was so different from the concurrent "95" fork.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Bill would know what a pain in the ass it is for an operating system to have a bunch of divergent and not always compatible offerings available.

If a Linux fork developed

[JeffTL]

I think a serious Linux fork would be no problem at all, thanks to the GPL. If it had features the official kernel lacked -- an almost certain proposition -- we can assume that these features would get eventually merged in. Of course, worst case scenario most Linux software can also run on BSD.

Re:Fud Fighters

[Otter]

Since somebody needs to actually RTFA...

The message of the linked article is that incompatibility between Linux distributions is a non-issue because the LSB is here to save us all! Given that LSB stories here (when not hidden behind a screen of "Mirco$oft is saying bad things about Lunix!!!!", as with this one) are met with a response along the lines of:

• 70% ridicule
• 15% "Why isn't deb/apt the standard?"
• 15% Why isn't portage the standard?"

perhaps, it's less than entirely reassuring.

In fact, the real answer is that cross-distribution incompatability isn't an issue is that: 1) a large market for binary-only Linux software still hasn't appeared and 2) what is out there simply targets Red Hat.

Re:Just like politics

[RicJohnson]

This is my BIGGEST problem with slashdot
Why is it every time I admit I am a Microsoft guy, I get modded down?
I really WANT to learn Linux. Can anyone help me understand Forking, or is everyone on /. a 1337 that has no time for a gnuB.
There are some helpful comments here I know can help my MS peers get off the ground - if only SOMBODY could mod the parent up!

Re:Linux distros *are* forking

[CAIMLAS]

Even if there is a major fork from a distro such as RedHat, I can only see two possible scenarios, or possibly a combination of two:

The distro that forks gets major ostricization and criticism from the community until they back out. Even still, it's unlikely that it would be a "longhorn" style fork, where they obsolete anything.

A distro forks and produces something quite superior to what is currently used. Within a couple weeks, those changes are all rolled into not only the main kernel tree, but various distro kernels as patches for short-term utilization of the new feature.

Remember, this is open source software. It's (legally) impossible for someone to pull a gates on the community and get away with it. There's no incentive to pull something which would lock other vendors out because by the bindings of the license they've agreed to (GPL), they have to disclose what they did. Not only that, but they would be majorly reamed by the OSS community and lose all semblance of trust.

Re:Microsoft and Interoperability ?

[Peter La Casse]

Not all of those are forks, but all of those competitive efforts are good. In what way do they contrast with the gcc and emacs examples?

Re:Microsoft and Interoperability ?

[beh]

I would go further and say even those examples show the most important characteristic:

The push ahead innovation - in this case, on the OSS side. Of course, in a sense it wastes development time, but on the other hand - when are you more motivated to code? When you're working on something nobody else in the OSS world is working on - or if you're working on something that has competition and you want to show off that your piece of software is better...?

Re:Linux distros *are* forking

[John Fulmer]

It's posts liket his that make me wish there were a '-1 Bullshit' moderation tag.....

Patches added to kernels != 'forking'.
Different software subsystems != 'forking'.
Different methods of hardware detection and setup != 'forking'.

If that's true, then Linux forked in the early/mid '90s, because Redhat used a more SysV-like bootup system, and SLackware used a more BSD-like bootup system.

Distros have always had sometimes significant differences between them. I've never, however, had problems getting things to run between distros, except for maybe library differences and versioning hell.

And the first distro that removes 'binary compatibility' will simply go away, because at that point it will cease to be 'Linux'.

Propoganda

[gone.fishing]

FUD, in all of it's manifestations is a sort of propoganda that can be easily equated to the negitive political ads that we in the United States see every time there is an election. When it comes to talking about all of the confusion that forking creates, it probably should be fought with answers that are real, simple, and above all logical.

Forking is a system that mimics "natural selection." When two camps have differing ideas they are both welcome to try it, whoever comes out with the "better" product is the "winner." The weaker of the two products may either "die on the vine" or continue to exist for those people who need the feature's it offers. If it dies, then the product that is being offered is clearly better. If both products continue to exist, then the user has more choices. Either way, the end user wins.

Most of today's modern automobiles have grown from "forks" of the original designs. There is no real reason why they have four wheels and symetric design other than that is what people favor. They have their humble starts with the Ford Model "T" and a few of it's fore-runners. Nobody complains that today, we have too much choice! Why is software any different?

In nature, we see that mono-cultures are almost always vunerable to some outside threat. Sadly, with the pervasivness of Microsoft Windows, we can see that the virtual world is also close to being a mono-culture. Is it any suprize that this operating system's vunerabilities have made things like viruses, trojans, spyware and other vunerabilities so wide-spread (and so dangerous)?

Forking is healthy. It works like natural evolution to both strengthen and diversify. It gives choice, and advances software's strengths and brings out it's weaknesses allowing developers to fix and improve. These are all good things!

Re:Interoperability, feh!

[Anonymous Coward]

MSDN is full of information about how to write your programs so that they would work on every Windows.

I have developed for Windows. Windows is also full of undocumented parameters, changes to existing parameters from version to version and just plain mistakes that are NOT covered in MSDN. Even smart coders cannot possibly guarantee working through the next version of Windows.

Re:Distribution forks are killing Linux

[ultranova]

Try downloading a package (NOT SOURCE) built for some old version of RedHat and installing it on a new Slackware distribution. It just plain does not work by default.

Of course it doesn't, any more than simply copying an install dir of a Windows app from one machine to the other will work. If you refuse to follow the normal installation routine of software for your system, the program doesn't work.

The normal installation routine for a Linux system is as follows:

1. Download the source package.
2. Untar it.
3. Give the following command:"./configure ; make ; su ; make install ; exit".

This has worked for almost every program I've ever installed. No programming skills needed, no need to have the slightest idea of what the commands at the last step do. Just memorize and type that litany. Shouldn't be too hard for anyone (and shouldn't be too hard to make a program that does it for you with a single mouseclick).

Sure, you need to download libraries sometimes. I've often hunted DLL's for Windows around the net to get some program or another to work. You want to avoid this, use your distributions package manager. You don't want to use automation, you need to install any missing pieces manually (which is usually no more difficult than reading the error message from configure, typing it to Google, and downloading and installing whatever comes up).

Simply because something is distributed in source format doesn't mean that you'd need to know anything about programming to get it to work. The source is for friendly neighbourdir compiler to read, Joe User doesn't need to care about it. After all, Joe doesn't need to know anything about compression technology to unzip the ZIP files that Windows programs are distributed in either, so why should he know or care what that "gcc" is that gets run when the install command is executed ?