[Asterisk-Users] Re: Asterisk forking, Was: Digium Website Update: Asterisk Business Edition

[Lee Howard]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:

>On Saturday 11 June 2005 16:10, trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com wrote:
>  
>
>>Personally I dont see a problem with any of this.  If digium makes it
>>too difficult to do stuff asterisk *can* be forked unless that is
>>forbidden (because its GPL I didnt bother to look at forking issues
>>    
>>
>
>Nope you can fork it, and in fact there have been several forks but AFAIK 
>they've all died out due to lack of mindshare.
>  
>

I don't think that "lack of mindshare" completely defines the reasons 
behind Asterisk fork failures.  It places all of the blame on the 
forkers.  I think the truth, though, is that they not only fail due to 
"lack of mindshare" but also due to competition from Digium's own 
Asterisk community.  Forks are not succeeding, yes, but Digium has a 
hand in that... of course they do.

I've heard more talk about Asterisk forks than I've ever heard about 
forks of any other other open-source project.  I think that this says 
something about how difficult-to-swallow Digium's dual-license decree is 
for a lot of prospective contributors/developers.

In many other open source software projects forks actually are good 
things for the community.  Often, each fork of the software feeds off of 
the others until they merge or until they diverge so completely that 
they are distinct softwares.  If you think of project "branches" as 
forks (like the Linux kernel version branches, 2.4 vs 2.6) this becomes 
even more apparent.  Users and some contributors are working with a 
different branch of the same software, make a contribution, and then 
that contribution is ported to the other branches where it can be used.  
We see this happen all of the time with the Linux kernel.  It happens 
with HylaFAX.  It happened with X.  I'm sure it happens a lot with many 
other open-source software projects.  It happens easily and usually is a 
"healthy" process because the playing field is even.

Each distributor will often customize and build-on to a software 
package.  If this isn't apparent, then take a look sometime at the 
myriad of patches that Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. apply 
to many of the larger software packages (the kernel, Ghostscript, the 
GUI) as they build them.  For all intents and purposes, these are each a 
separate fork of the software.  Eventually these customizations can work 
themselves back down into the original source repository, and the entire 
community (including all of the forks) benefit from the exposure.

Of course, this "healthy" forking cannot be done with Asterisk because 
Digium will not accept any non-disclaimed code into their repository.  
Thus any fork will, by decree, become a competitive fork.  It is not in 
Digium's best interests to see forking succeed... otherwise they should 
expect to lose market value in their investment - certainly they would 
lose market share.  And, for this reason, the playing field was set up 
unevenly.  It was Digium's code to contribute, and it was Digium's 
perogative to set things up the way they did.

In this atmosphere of competition, then, a competing fork will never 
succeed unless the fork goes into a lot of work setting up mailing 
lists, setting up bug tracking, setting up web sites, download sites, 
etc.  Plus, the fork must continually monitor contributions to the 
competitors and port them to their fork.  And, then on top of all of 
that, the fork must undergo a continuous development push that is 
significant enough in comparison to the competition that gets it enough 
exposure and attention to attract a user community and a developer 
community in order to sustain the "arms race" until the purposes of the 
fork are acheived.  This is no easy task.

I think if all of those who have been discouraged to contribute to 
Asterisk because of Digium's dual-license policy (and this is no small 
number, mind you) were to unite and continue the fork with the same zeal 
that they had in ranting and complaining about Digium, then I think a 
fork could potentially succeed.  But, unless someone can point me to 
someone or some company that is going to make that happen, I don't think 
that it will.  I think that, for the most part, there's not enough 
motivation behind the rants to make a successful fork happen in the face 
of the competition.

Lee.