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posted by on Friday February 24 2017, @03:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-a-knife-in-the-back dept.

Bruce Byfield's Blog covers some drama taking over the NTPSec fork of the NTP (Network Time Protocol) software, which is running on just about every unix-like operating system.

Apparently the original forking team invited Eric Raymond and Susan Sons into their project. That didn't work out too well as Raymond and Sons (no actual offspring involved), proceeded to take over the whole effort and use it for their own grandiosity. Then they ejected the project leader.

Byfield uses the story to spin his distaste for Forks for the Wrong Reasons.

However, a few weeks ago, while preparing an article about the animosity between the Network Time Protocol and its off-shoot NTPsec, I came to the conclusion that there are forks that deserve support, and others that do not. The more I investigated, the harder a neutral presentation of NTPsec became. Increasingly, it seemed a fork made for most of the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways.

We've seen some rather large projects spin out of forks over the years, some good, some bad, some dead, and others surviving long past any rational reason. The list is long. The quality is varied.

What are some of the WORST forks Soylentils have seen that somehow still persist?


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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:07PM (#471181)

    What has Eric Raymond ever contributed of any complexity to software?

    I prefer people who contribute simplicity to software.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:21PM (#471225)

    I prefer people who contribute simplicity to software that actually does something.
    All I know of his contributions are "fetchmail" which downloads your email in a batch to read later and a failed configuration syntax for
    configuring a Linux bootup or compilation or some such. Really unimpressive from a technical chops point of view.

    Do you know of something more impressive that he has accomplished? He is known for his early writings about developer culture when the Internet was exploding, not for his software.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:24PM (#471228)

      He is an advocate, nothing else.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:07AM (#471374)

      Unlike RMS, he successfully avoided writing EMACS. That's gotta count for something.

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:51PM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:51PM (#471486) Journal

        Unlike RMS, he successfully avoided writing EMACS. That's gotta count for something.

        Did he contribute to vi? No? Then it really doesn't matter.

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:53AM

      by driverless (4770) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:53AM (#473194)

      All I know of his contributions are "fetchmail" which downloads your email in a batch to read later and a failed configuration syntax for configuring a Linux bootup or compilation or some such. Really unimpressive from a technical chops point of view.

      He was also the driving force behind some universal application-layer protocol that was heavily promoted within the IETF, chiefly by him, as the mandatory solution to any problem of moving data from A to B. It was such a sucking void that I can neither remember its name (it was a silly one), nor find it with a Google search. My main memory of it was that it made writing new RFCs in some areas a bitch for awhile because you were supposed to use this thing instead of anything normal.

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:58AM

        by driverless (4770) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:58AM (#473195)

        Argh, sorry, wrong person, it was Marshall Rose's BEEP. Used by precisely nothing on earth, it allowed you to do roughly the same as what HTTP does but in an incompatible manner.