> started to demand that the Mercurial project work the way that Facebook wanted
Seems to be a recurring pattern when people interact with open source communities. Why does it have to be like this? It's not just companies either...
Seems to be a recurring pattern when people interact with open source communities. Why does it have to be like this? It's not just companies either...
Because motivated, high performing people need to have control over their own destiny. Because cookie-cutter solutions which work for 90% of use cases are often worse than something explicitly tuned for you.
People having specific needs, getting frustrated and then solving their problem is a feature of opensource code. Its not a bug. It is the engine of innovation and improvement. Forking means we can both get what we want, even if our needs are contradictory or we don't want to work together.
This happens with commercial offerings too - but its a mess. You can't just fork the code without paying (or sometimes at all). And every fork is private, so work is duplicated and collective learning doesn't happen. Expensive consulting-ware might be the best case outcome.
The ability of motivated people to fork projects and have their own spin on things is one of the biggest strengths of opensource. May the best forks win.
This opinion seems to be peculiar to software and I think it has something to do with the fact that software is one of the few verticals where you can (attempt to) intellectualize everything.
Having control over your own destiny in any other skilled labor job seems to be 98% about finding a brand and model of tool that works the way you do, and 2% building your own tools or jigs for that specialty task nobody thought to build a tool for.
In software it's anywhere from 90:10 to 10:90 depending on how much emotional baggage your coworkers are carrying around.
I don't quite buy this: Those same "motivated, high performing people" don't seem to have anywhere near the same "need to have control over their own destiny" when it comes to the commercial closed-source tools they use.
I’ve seen people reinvent the wheel all over the place because their tools weren’t quite working for them. This instinct is the reason most good software has APIs - so you don’t have to ditch the tool entirely to customise it to your workflow. And most medium to large companies have all sorts of wacky customisations on top of existing software.
Eg perforce at Google. Well, everything at Google. And a friend at a big broadcaster has a bunch of company specific plugins for Reaper for their audio editing pipeline. And everyone insists on customising Jira.