In fact, Gould says it ended up causing some stress, with the Sodipodi maintainer encouraging them to fork his project.Īnd fork it, they did. Gould and a few others initially tried to route pull requests through the Hydra branch of Sodipodi, hoping to give the Sodipodi maintainer highly usable fixes that would make them easier to merge into the Sodipodi main. Someone might submit a patch, for example, and they were stalled while the project maintainer would do a “complete review,” which proved to be more of a “rewrite.” This slowed down development and discouraged contributions. Even so, this didn’t make the decision to fork Sodipodi any easier.Īccording to Gould, he and other developers wanted to contribute to Sodipodi but couldn’t. As mentioned, the Inkscape co-founders forked Sodipodi, which in turn was a fork of the Gill project.
Inkscape comes from a fine pedigree of forks. It turns out this apparent dissonance makes for some interesting dynamics.īut first, let’s talk about that fork. Why? Because Inkscape was made for designers interested in creating the perfect logo or beautiful art, yet is developed by engineers who may not have the same creative urge. The result has been a hugely popular - and hugely welcoming - community, though hardly a typical one for open source. The Inkscape creators didn’t want to fork Sodipodi, but they wanted to make it so that anyone could contribute or be involved in the project. The problem with Sodipodi, as Gould related in an interview, wasn’t architectural - it was community, or rather, the lack thereof. Gould has a long history in systems engineering, but became well-known in open source circles due to his pioneering design work on the Ubuntu desktop. Take Sodipodi, an open source vector graphics project that Ted Gould and others forked to create Inkscape. In some ways a fork suggests open source is functioning as it should in other ways, it’s a clear indication that an open source project has failed. You can follow him on Twitter freedom to fork may well be the cardinal rule of open source, as open source luminary Brian Behlendorf once asserted, but forking is not an action that gets taken lightly. Matt is a principal at AWS and has been involved in open source and all that it enables (cloud, machine learning, data infrastructure, mobile, etc.) for nearly two decades, working for a variety of open source companies and writing regularly for InfoWorld and TechRepublic.
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