[OT] Slugworth

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richmond is right in one respect, the Mir episode shows the kind of difficult
choice of approach that LiveCode is going to come up against.  Canonical
does seem to have the approach of make it and throw it over the wall, source
code and all.  The danger is that the project gets forked by people who have
a vision and want to make contributions but feel they are being shut out.

The other side of the same coin is that a small team simply can't manage the
chaos of incompatible contributions and submissions by people less than well
qualified who want to rewrite chunks of the product, and gets swamped or
feel they are losing control.

You can see quite a few examples of forking if you look.  xfree86 vanished
without trace.  Libreoffice is picking up speed and being the standard in
most distros.  Mysql seems to have been forked. The Unity approach is too
close to the Windows 8 approach for me to be comfortable with it.  Its very
much take it or leave it, and it looks to me like that same approach is what
is killing both KDE and Gnome 3.  I don't know of cases where people have
been unable to manage community based products but am sure there must be
some.

It feels like very much the right decision to open source, and the level of
support was very encouraging, but it remains a brave decision, and an awful
lot is going to hang on the execution on this very point.  I very much hope
they manage it better than either Gnome, KDE or Canonical.



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