[Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems

[David Gerard]

On 16 August 2011 10:59, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> That leads us to the serious dead end: We want forkability because of
> our principles. We could potentially lose parts of our movement.
> According to our principles, the only way to protect the movement is
> to be attractive to editors more than potential forks could be. And
> that's our structural problem: we are losing that battle since ~2007
> and changes which we are making are too slow and too small.
> And that opens the space for even worse scenario. The last hope for
> societies in such decline is to impose martial law and try to fix
> things by not so pleasant methods. The only problem is that we are not
> society. Nobody would be killed because of Wikimedia fall and no
> economy would be destructed. More importantly, when people see harsh
> methods imposed (and one of them would be forbidding [easy]
> forkability), they would start to leave the project, which would just
> catalyze the fall.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29

Precis: annoy a subcommunity sufficiently, they leave in a group. Try
to stop them from leaving (as opposed to trying to attract them back),
they leave faster and take others with them.

This is what I mean when I say "forkability will keep us honest."


- d.