- Every year or so, someone announces a new "Cydia competitor". Almost always, these projects either never come to fruition, are nothing like how they were portrayed before release, or don't actually offer much of value over the existing solutions: they tend to disappear as quickly as they were announced.
Most of the them start from a common premise: that SaurikIT (my company behind Cydia) is not effectively monetizing our ecosystem, in particular for "end users", and that they see a "market opportunity". I think a lot of people find my reaction to this kind of competition confusing, so I'm writing an article to address that.
Good article. This is probably my main problem with the IT sphere and especially startups right now. It's definitely part of why I left my last job working as a contractor. Now-a-days, it seems like "competition" at all levels of scale is the new status quo: people find a bug in a program (I've personally had this happen with WinterBoard and Substrate's Safe Mode), and they don't even report it... they fix it for themselves, release a new binary, and use their "competitive advantage" to get people to switch :/. I had never actually thought about this, but it's true. The culture these days is all about usurping one another and being "better", not really about community or building something. Shameful, really. Edit: Here's a little story I have that I thought would be relevant: a long time ago I remember there was a certain text editor on OS X I really liked using. There was a nasty bug in it I found - not that it was anything serious, it was just annoying to me. I emailed the developer about it (if I remember right, he was the only one working on it) and he later ended up thanking me for the catch and fixing it later on my suggestion. It felt really good! I very much enjoyed that I was able to directly help make one of the programs I liked even better. There was nothing commercial or competitive about it. Talking with some of my colleagues over the years, I can't help but think everyone else would be jumping at the opportunity to fork off (it was not open source, but that's beside the point) and make their own editor for everyone to switch over to with said problem fixed and more - picture a businessman-like voice pitching that one - like Saurik says. That doesn't really sit well with me."Back in my day", if you had an issue with an open source project, you didn't "fork it" and ask questions later: you joined the mailing list or IRC channel, talked over what you were trying to contribute, and got into a discussion about whether it was or was not a good idea and how to go about getting it integrated.
I've seen this mentality a lot as well, in particular the idea of "if you don't like this fork it" which extends beyond just software. I wonder how much of it is people not being willing to compromise on something they've started and how much of it is people not willing to work on it and just "fork it". Anyways, look guys, I've got this genius way to publish blog posts: It's like an even more minimalist Medium/Svtble with extensibility of Wordpress and the reblogging virality of tumblr. It'll be open for a private first-look-alpha to enterprising thought leaders only until I can make a techcrunch launch in 2015, get some funding, pivot, then open it to everyone else by abandoning it on github. edit: oh yeah, you can follow my progress in r/bestblog on reddit, and if you don't like how I moderate you can follow on r/truebestblog or r/bestblogrebooted
I'm not sure if it's about competitiveness. Communicating is a lot slower and more frustrating than hacking. In the old days, forking came at a cost; keeping up with upstream changes to a project that was actively developed was a huge pain, so it was easier to try to get your changes accepted upstream, even if you had to do some work to convince them to take it. With git, it's only inconvenient when upstream changes something you changed too, and that probably doesn't happen often, so the easier thing to do is just maintain your fork.
This is also something I thought about. It's really easy with git to just fork a project and do a pull request upstream if you wanted to contribute something to the original project. I get the feeling too many people would bypass that latter part and just hope their changes catch on to some as-of-yet unfulfilled niche of users of the original to keep their fork maintained - needlessly fragmenting the program and its userbase as a whole so they can get their 15 minutes of fame and satisfied delusions of grandeur. Maybe I'm just too cynical...
I don't think you're being cynical, but I do think everyone (including the author of the article) might be looking at the past through rose colored glasses. People are not always kind on mailing lists, and that can turn a lot of people off from software. Theo De Raadt forked OpenBSD from NetBSD specifically because of personality clashes iirc. You can also take a look at Eric Raymond's "How to ask questions the smart way" http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html and find little bits of passive aggressiveness and misanthropy. I submit that open source has always been a mix of competition and cooperation in almost equal parts. That the only real change here has been that the number of active users in the open source realm has grown. Also I have issues with this: I don't care if someone forks software as long as the license permits it. Why would I? If you don't want someone to be able to do that, relicense it! There isn't much fragmentation when a fork is created, and usually unmaintained software will be given up on in the short future. needlessly fragmenting the program and its userbase as a whole so they can get their 15 minutes of fame and satisfied delusions of grandeur
Yeah after thinking about it I make it sound like the whole premise of the hundreds of *nix flavors weren't all conceived under basically identical circumstances and that's by no means a bad thing, so I suppose it can certainly go both ways. Speaking of asshole programmers, I found out the guy that wrote the Learn Code the Hard Way series (which I actually like a lot) is a huge dick, which is disappointing. I dunno what it is about this profession that makes people act like that. I was going to link to a bunch of examples of his Good Behavior from Twitter but it seems he's made that private now, with separate "news" and "PR" accounts. Ha ha! That's a new development.
It's a very egotistic way of viewing projects, in my opinion. You're not helping a community effort, only yourself and those you want to be along for the promotional ride while you await becoming the next SV poster boy. That just does not mesh well with my personal ideologies, but it is so widespread in this industry it hurts.