they are terrible for the customers and Linux devs should think of the people who use their software as a cusomer, not as users. The product may be notionally free, but this doesn't mean that the userbase should expect poor customer services. Forking a product means that customers who have already chosen to use that product are presented with a choice of two or more products which may or may not do all of what they wanted to do in the first place. If you pick the wrong fork you may end up a year down the line using abandonware and face a huge challenge getting back to where you were. Re: @AC 16:38GMT - A few more lumps of confusion in the article Choice is what you have when you decide what you want to use in the first place. Inconvenience and irritation is what you have when the product you are using ceases to be and you are presented with two or more forks to choose from, forks which may or may not do the job you initially wanted. Re: @AC 16:38GMT - A few more lumps of confusion in the article No, that's choice. You seem to be complaining that there will be relatively painless alternatives when an open source project up and dies. What happens when proprietary software is abandoned? No choice there. You have to find something else that likely is completely incompatible with your existing system. With the forks you at least have something