Re:Why we Forked Firefox and Not Chromium
by hinkley on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:12PM
(#21828195)
Look, for instance, to the history of forks of Postgres to add new functionality.
Initial version often involve heavy surgery. Then the maintainers have to manually merge from upstream essentially forever. Manual merges are not fun, they are tedious, and they are prone to errors (in part because they are tedious).
Over time these companies get a better grip on the bare minimum they need from Postgres' internals and file PRs. The goal is for their changes to be an add-on instead of a code fork.
From what I understand, Postgres team rarely has any vested interest in being antagonistic to these companies. Google's business model pushes them toward being antagonistic to any such efforts. Which means cliqz is stuck managing a fork forever, and may even run into cat-and-mouse games.
Initial version often involve heavy surgery. Then the maintainers have to manually merge from upstream essentially forever. Manual merges are not fun, they are tedious, and they are prone to errors (in part because they are tedious).
Over time these companies get a better grip on the bare minimum they need from Postgres' internals and file PRs. The goal is for their changes to be an add-on instead of a code fork.
From what I understand, Postgres team rarely has any vested interest in being antagonistic to these companies. Google's business model pushes them toward being antagonistic to any such efforts. Which means cliqz is stuck managing a fork forever, and may even run into cat-and-mouse games.
The only way to win is not to play.