E-Dribble

Most of the regulars know my stance on what I consider is the crippling addiction of open source software to fork.  The nerds just can’t seem to help themselves.

Well, as I stated in the previous post, it’s definitely not just the OS developers that find this to be a powerful attribute of FOSS.  Count the DB devs in, too! After Oracle’s purchase of Sun, shit hit the fan in regards to MySQL and offshoots appeared overnight.  If you think it’s because of Oracle, you would be wrong.  Listening to the lead developers that are jumping ship to develop their own version, they were unhappy even when Sun was in the captain’s chair.  This was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

If that isn’t enough asininity for you, one of the key developers of MySQL has announced the formation of the Open Database Alliance, a “vendor-neutral consortium” whose stated aim is to become “the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem.”

These egoists require so many forks, they need a fucking “alliance” to keep track of the different versions.

It’s become so hard to keep a straight face when I find threads from linux users that are truly perplexed as to why the operating system hasn’t spread like wildfire and overtaken Microsoft.

It’s because the developers are too busy forming alliances and consortiums.