is Dead, Long Live LibreOffice -- or, The Freedom to Fork is
Dead, Long Live LibreOffice -- or, The Freedom to Fork   In the
free software community, there's a pretty big fear of "forks".
After all, if the project is free-licensed, there's nothing
preventing any one developer from taking the whole project and
developing their own version, maintained on another site.
Revolution is bad, but oppression can be worse  We fear this,
because it's wasteful. If it happened all the time, free
software development would disintegrate into zillions of tiny
pockets with no room for large organized projects -- it's kind
of like the fear that absolute democracy will result in "mob
rule."  Others fear that competing projects will create a
situation of "too much choice" which will confuse users with a
plethora of nearly-identical offerings.  However, by and large,
everyone involved appreciates this, and so even though it isn't
forbidden by the licenses, it rarely happens. So why don't we
just write the licenses such that they