open...

As you may have noticed, open standards are a hot topic currently. One person who deals with them all the time in a variety of ways is Ch...

Regular readers of this column will know that I'm something of a fan of forks, but even I was surprised when OpenOffice.org was forked b...

When I was reviewing the fall-out from Nokia's decision to stake its future on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 system, I mentioned paren...

Over on the RedMonk blog, there's an entertaining post by James Governor on the subject of forks, prompted by the imminent arrival of a ...

Last week I wrote a piece entitled “Are We Entering the Golden Age of Forks?” I concluded: I predict we are going to see plenty more forks i...

In July 1998, the Frenchman Gaël Duval released his new GNU/Linux distribution called Mandrake-Linux. It was a fork of Red Hat using the KDE...

Every now and then, a shiver runs through the Linux community as people realise afresh that the entire edifice has a single point of failure...

Apparently, there's an interesting thread over on a site called Quora about the future of Firefox. I say apparently, since I can't s...

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple of...

So, it finally happened: We are pleased to announce that Oracle has completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Sun is now a wholly ow...

One of the unique features of free software is that it can be forked. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful incentives for projects to hew ...

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called “Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement“, which began: Can...

Jeremy Zawodny, ex-Yahoo, currently at Craigslist, is generally regarded as one of the gurus of the MySQL world. His recent thoughts on the ...

On Linux Journal .

I noted yesterday how useful the fork can be. But forking well is not easy. Here's an interesting example of how not to do it. IBM re...

One of the critical apps in any software ecosystem is a web authoring system. Until recently, the main free software offering was Nvu, but ...

It is a truism in the open source world that the threat of a fork keeps code honest. When contributors who disagree with the way a project ...

Citizendium is a wonderful test of many things, and it just became even more interesting because it has decided to unfork itself from Wikip...

Barely a week after Linden Lab freed the code of the Second Life viewer, we have a fork: Open SL . Not much there , yet, but this is going...

Eric says : The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don...