The last time I had checked it, the thread had fallen short of it’s comedic potential but the seed had nevertheless been planted.  I got to contemplating the urge in people to split from an existing group or community only to create another group or community.  So there.  Neener, Neener.  The only difference is that you have no user base and you’re going to spend your time on your forum talking to yourself.

This doesn’t just happen in  social communities.  Open source software is world renown(and ridiculed) for this.  Don’t like the way Francisco Burzi handles the development of PHP-Nuke?  Well, just fork the development.  Ok, except hundreds of people did just that separately of each other.  The 10 or so that didn’t fail immediately all continued on while acting as if the others didn’t exist.  Some of the refusal to work together between the development teams were for reasons as small as simple coding methods.  All agreed that they could work together if the other team would change their development method.  Sometimes they would get together just long enough to have a fantastic falling out that ended in a reforking of the already forked project.

But wait there’s more examples to be had than just the soap opera style explosions of egos between small-change coders.  Let’s look at linux in general.  Have a look at the popularity page on Distrowatch.com.  It lists 300 flavors of linux on this page and tracks their popularity from day to day so you can see if your favorite brand of linux is more popular than it was yesterday. Only if it’s in the top 300 distros though. If your distro comes in at 301, you’re out of luck.

The top 300 operating systems.  Think about the scope of that. Windows offers you three distributions and if you go with a Mac, you can follow Henry Ford’s line of thinking, who said “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.” Linux has so many that this particular fan site restricts it’s tracking to 300 distributions.  In spite of this, the linux zealots wonder why the operating system can’t be taken seriously by Joe Sixpack.  You can claim that there’s legitimate reasons for separate distributions and I would agree.  If, however you argue that there is a legitimate reason for hundreds of wrappers for the same linux, I would ask you if you had lost your bong while wandering through the blog. This openness is the greatest asset linux has.  The extent in which it is used is it’s greatest Achille’s heel.   God forbid we simply offer an application package for a particular flavor of *nx.  We should most definitely offer our own flavor so we can tailor it to people that collect bottle caps.  They deserve their own distribution of linux.

The very same mindset that makes people care what place their distro is in on the popularity page at Distrowatch.com is the one that causes people to fork scripts for no real reason and create competing forums when plenty already exist.  There’s an inflated sense of ego that people don’t know how to handle.  They’re incensed that something they hold important was deemed less important by others.  It never crosses their mind to simply move on to one of the millions of other forums out there, collaberate on a script in spite of minor differences or in the case of linux distros, just use one of the hundreds of freaking flavors at your disposal.

You’re all doing it wrong.

Unless your intention is to muddy the waters more than it already is, in which case you’re a griefer and you’re actually doing it right.