Friday, September 24, 2010

Forking times ahead!!!!

Forks everywhere. That is the beauty of FLOSS. Anybody with a little background about the working of Operating systems will know that "fork()" is the system call used to start a new process. When the "fork()" system call is called, the os makes a copy of the parent process(complete with data, program and stack content). After this the "exec" system call would replace the parent image with the child information.

Exactly the same is happening in the FLOSS world. It all started with the orphaning of the opensolaris project by oracle. There was an inevitable fork and there are two projects which have taken the original code and released their own taste of opensolaris. So Opensolaris lives on without the support of big daddy.

Sidux, one of my favorite distro also had the same problems with its sponsor. So, what happens, fork is called and you have aptosid, which is true to the sidux project in all respect. It prides itself in packaging software from the unstable(sid) branch of the debian GNU/linux project(Debian once again).

Now, can Redhat stand up and fork mysql so as to continue the flagship programming model of the GNU/linux universe. I meant the LAMP stack(GNU/Linux, Apache web server, Mysql DBMS, PHP scripting). I request redhat to take up mysql under its umbrella of development or I would suggest it to merge whatever possible code with postgresql(Dont flame me regarding the technicalities).

Corporations, beware!, nobody owns Free/libre software. It is and will be developed for the public good and in testing times, they will always be FORKED!!!!!!!!!!. ha ha ha ha!!!!

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Nobody can deter me away from "free as in freedom" concept seeded by Sri RMS. See to it that u dont make fun of my belief. If u think otherwise, no need to comment.