FOSS-fork research

[John Nilsson]

Hi,

We are students of Lund University doing our Bachelor thesis for the Systems Design-programme.

We are conducting research on why and how FOSS projects fork. The aim of the research is to better understand the special issues regarding FOSS-projects with regards to the forces leading up to a fork. We hope that any knowledge gained from this can be incorporated in the future education of System analysts. Our focus is the motivation of the developers involved. We are now looking for developers from the Compiz and Beryl projects who would like to share their experience and thoughts with us to base our research on.

We hope this forum is the correct forums to reach the developers of the project. If not please direct us to the proper forum. (We tried the mailinglists first, but there was some problems.)

If you are interested in helping us please reply in private to john.nilsson@hermes.ics.lu.se or johan.sanesson@hermes.ics.lu.se

If you desire to be anonymous we will take action to ensure this.

Regards,
John Nilsson
Johan Sånesson

[RYX]

Hi John, hi Johan!

Your work sounds very interesting and I am sure there are some people willing to help (including myself), though it can get difficult to get an unbiased summary of all events that led to the whole situation ;). If you are not afraid of reading a very emotional and sometimes overheated discussion then this post may be a good starting point: Link (http://forum.compiz.org/viewtopic.php?t=709) - it is a "live"-demonstration of how a friendly discussion can become a cold war.

This forum is more a place for the community than for the developer(s), so if you want to reach the compiz-developers you should try the mailing list at http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/ ... (if you had problems connecting then please try again, the freedesktop-site was down for some days).

best regards

RYX

[John Nilsson]

Thanks for the tip.
We will try the list again.

We will check the post as well.