In the open source world forking is a common concept, largely endorsed by GitHub's fork & pull requests work-flow. Forking a large and successful project and creating a new one, with its own eco-system is rare though.
Recently I came across the MATE desktop environment which is a fork of GNOME 2. Even more interesting is that they forked lots of standard GNOME applications as well. Being behind the world's leading enterprise OS where maintaining a private fork is sometimes necessary I wondered why MATE had to do this.
Here are some interesting responses from mate-dev:
Well, MATE is born in a time of fear, so Perberos forked almost all GNOME 2 applications. Currently, we are dropping a lot of packages to focus our effort on what we need really.
...
The main reason of this is to have a base set of apps in GTK 2. Another reason, most GNOME apps (like Evince) are suffering mockups that dont follow the traditional idea of MATE.
When MATE will be GTK3, we'll consider again if keeping or not such applications.
Stefano Karapetsas http://ml.mate-desktop.org/pipermail/mate-dev/2013-March/000091.html
A similar question was also asked not long after the MATE forum was created, which was probably somewhere early in 2012. Steve Zesch answered that we would be sure that we wouldn't be affected by feature/UI choices of the GNOME developers, which we would have been if MATE relied on GNOME 3 applications. He used Caja as an example. Caja looked -of course- similar to Nautilus. It had some features Nautilus 3 didn't, but the reverse was true as well. Nautilus 3 looked better, though, so it was not very surprising that we got (and get) this question. But Steve's example of Caja turned out to be pretty much spot on, when Nautilus 3.6 was released, and almost all of the changes were removed features (it was even described by a former GNOME developer as 'vandalism'). Canonical decided to use 3.4 for Ubuntu 12.10, although the original plan was to include 3.6. Linux Mint forked 3.4 as Nemo.
And there's no good reason for this, as far as I can see. The interfaces of Gnome have always been simple enough not to be overwhelming for novice users, but at the same time powerful enough for the power users. Which is a fine - and rare - balance. They completely messed it up in Gnome 3.
...
So although Gedit, Evince and GNOME Terminal are fine now, I doubt it's safe to assume they will stay that way. Especially since we've already seen what happened to the fallback mode of Gnome 3 (completely removed, although many people use it and Ubuntu's Unity depends on it) and Nautilus (vandalised).
...
Well, ok, that was a big rant. But to summarise my post (and Stefano's): it was a decision that had to be taken quickly, and from the integration and control viewpoint, it seems like was a good idea after all. Especially now many deprecated underlying technologies have been replaced.
Michael Steenbeek http://ml.mate-desktop.org/pipermail/mate-dev/2013-March/000092.html
Well, when two teams are maintaining applications with very little differences, that can be considered a waste of time and effort. It was very easy to say about the MATE applications as well, before we knew what GNOME would do to its applications. Now GNOME is removing more and more features from its applications and changing their GUI to a tablet interface, it turned to be the right decision.
Michael Steenbeek http://ml.mate-desktop.org/pipermail/mate-dev/2013-March/000095.html
Comments !