Spin-off (software development)
A cleavage (also Fork ; English fork , fork ', usually in the masculine used) is in the software development , a development branch after the splitting of a project in two or more subsequent projects; the source texts or parts of them are further developed independently of the original parent project. Often, especially with regard to copyright, the term derivative (derivative, Latin derivare , to derive) is used in this context .
backgrounds
Spin-offs take place predominantly in free software projects, since with these the right to further develop and change is usually possible in terms of licensing. In closed source projects, spin-offs can occur if several companies work together and share the - possibly new - rights to the product. The opposite of a spin-off also occasionally occurs, for example when a split-off project is reunited with the parent project.
Project examples
(Examples of projects that arose from splits.)
- The NTFS file system is based on HPFS , the OS / 2 file system .
- The free OpenOffice.org (known today as Apache OpenOffice) split off from StarOffice , which was further developed commercially until 2010.
- LibreOffice split from OpenOffice.org after Sun Microsystems (the original developer) was bought by Oracle .
- The web content management system Joomla originated from Mambo .
- The editor XEmacs , developed from Emacs .
- The EGCS compiler emerged from GCC and was later reunited with it.
- The Mozilla web browser has many subsidiary projects, some of which are Mozilla Firefox and Galeon , which in turn has been split up: Epiphany .
- The multimedia player MPlayerXP emerged from MPlayer .
- VNC was released from 2002 with version 3.3. chargeable. As a result, other implementations were made under the GPL that use the same protocol .
- The file sharing software aMule ( eDonkey network) emerged from xMule .
- The peer-to-peer software FrostWire emerged from LimeWire .
- The BSD derivative OpenBSD emerged from NetBSD and attaches greater importance to security than the parent project. Also went DragonFly BSD from FreeBSD forth.
- X.Org emerged from XFree86 , whose developers introduced a different license with version 4.4.
- The Composite Window Manager Beryl emerged from Compiz after discrepancies in its own ranks . Both projects have now been reunited under the name Compiz Fusion
- The collection of programs for burning CDs and DVDs cdrkit was split off from cdrtools after a license disputes .
- Libav emerged from disputes among the developers of the FFmpeg project and replaced it in Debian and Ubuntu .
- The hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain resulting in the duplicated Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Forks are common, especially in the field of cryptocurrencies, and take place at regular intervals. The Bitcoin blockchain alone has been hard-forked over 74 times.
Version control systems
In version control systems , a spin-off is generally not the result of disputes among the developers or of inactivity of a project, but rather a regular tool within the framework of branches to contribute innovations to a project. In the case of distributed version management systems, there is also the option of being able to create branches without writing authorization to the original version management system. For Linus Torvalds ' Linux operating system kernel, there are more than 14,000 spin-offs on the software developer platform GitHub alone , most of which are not designed to be further developed on their own, but rather that their individual innovations can be incorporated into the original project - or more precisely into the original sources (or repositories ). Such branches are accordingly more internal forks.
copyright
In copyright law, which also applies to software, the term derivative has exactly the same meaning as in all other areas. This means, for example, that a derivative of software, as long as there is no authorization by the rights holder of the software, is only created under certain conditions (e.g. error correction) (depending on the country, e.g. regulated by EU directives ) and in particular may not be disseminated. I.e. as long as the software license does not explicitly allow derivatives to be generated or distributed, this is prohibited. This also plays an important role in the case of SCO against Linux , because SCO has declared AIX and the Linux kernel with system software to be unauthorized Unix derivatives . Although it is controversial whether SCO has these rights at all, SCO can, as long as no copyrighted source code is found in the GNU / Linux system, no guilty verdict, e.g. B. for a Linux distributor , based on copyright.
Individual evidence
- ↑ coin.ink: Hard fork and tax: Hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. coin.ink, accessed June 11, 2019 .
- ↑ Network Graph · torvalds / linux (English) - page at GitHub ; As of March 8, 2015.