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Comment by beseku | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest, it's an MVC JS framework centred around jQuery or Zepto. If I'm familiar with Backbone, what is going to drag me over to this - the size/number of lines of code isn't, thats for sure.

Javascript frameworks are making all of the mistakes that PHP frameworks did, no differentiation and promoting fragmentation. Backbone is up on Github so would it not have been more constructive to fork it and create one great product, not two less great products?

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As in the general economy ... competition between similar open-source projects is good for developers. Spine provides an alternative way of accomplishing the same goals as Backbone, written in a different style. I'm sure there's lots that both projects can learn/steal/share with one another.

Open source isn't a zero-sum game, the more you share, the more you have to give away.

That's what we all sign up for. Some share more than most, which I'm sure many have/will thank you for!

Backbone doesn't become any less great because a similar project has appeared. If we are to believe the claims of the creator, Spine is fundamentally different from Backbone, so I dont think a fork would have sufficed.

I disagree - The more people work with something, the more it can be refined. If you read through the Issues page on Github for Backbone, there are 100s of comments, suggestions and bug fixes, all helping to improve the code and make a better framework.

By introducing a too-similar competitor, (in general, not necessarily Spine) you risk fragmenting the above, which leads to many okay projects, not one great projects.

The point I was making was that Spine isn't a refinement. It may look the same on the surface, but it has some very different ideas about what a Controller is, amongst other concepts.

It's unreasonable to suggest that anyone who has an idea for a project simply abandon it because someone's already working on something similar. It's also unreasonable to suggest that if they do end up writing something really cool that touches on a few concepts of an existing project, that they should keep it to themselves.

I found the documentation for Spine much better than Backbone, or else it was just designed in a more intuitive way. Either way I wanted to use Backbone a while back, but kinda gave up on it.

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