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Forking is OK
Colmeia Off Topics - São Paulo
Fabricio
Campos Zuardi
fabricio.org
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Apresentaçao
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Hacker Culture
- scratch an itch
- open source products
- projetos open vs. corporate culture
[Business leaders] They don't LIKE you. Because they need you but they don't understand anything you do.
-- Zed Shaw
- fight your harder not to be a corporate coder
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Free Revealing
- Vale a pena? (Free Revealing vs Secret/patents from Democratizing Innovation)
- Innovators do not think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties
- little profit is sacrificed when you choose to forgo the possibility of legally protect your invention instead of free revealing
- Positive Incentives for free revealing
- reputation gain
- increase programmer's value on the job market
- increase firm's profit if the revealed innovation is specific to assets owned by the innovator
- can become an informal standard that may preempt the development of other versions of the innovation
- If you're so worried about people forking the code that you actually want to install barriers to prevent it, then perhaps FOSS is not for you.
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Forking
- project centric-versus people centric, or the David x Chris discussion
- Developer > Project, or Project > Developer(s)
- modelos open source: benevolent dictator (linux) vs. group of people who make decisions and act as arbiters of what goes into the project (apache)
- In volunteer-run FOSS projects, you want lots of forks; It means work is getting done.
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Cases
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- computing in the 80s
- lower the costs/barrier, allow amateurs to participate
- Wordpress plugins ecosystem
- MS Excel macros
- Firefox extentions, XUL, chrome
- Internet Platforms
- clonability
- the importance of not need to ask permission => participate without asking permission
- projetos promissores: Ning, Freebase, BUG Labs, Android
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Reasons to fork
- frustration
- disagreement
- very specific problem
- trademark issues
- main developer lose interest
- dead projects > most projects on sourceforge are abandoned
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Fork downsides
- Forking divides efforts as the two projects often take slightly different turns
- duplication of effort
- security risks
- maintaining a divergent fork takes a lot of work. -> Git helps solving this
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Saindo do código (what about content?)
- Creative Commons
- Remix, remix platforms
- DIY
- Open Media Web
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The end