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Thursday, 4 April 2013

Forking, Spooning or Knifing?

Reading the tech news this week, there's a lot of talk about forking. Google Blink forking AppKit. Apple not forking Chromium because that would be hostile. Facebook 'forking' Android. Even Tim O'Reilly forking the memetic nature of Free Software into Open Source.

However not all of these things are really forks, and forking is no longer necessarily a hostile act. Lets go through them. Google Blink is a fork of Webkit, or rather of Webcore. Alex explains this is to reduce the amount of time they need to spend merging back to Webkit, but it doesn't preclude anyone continuing to do this if desired. Maciej explained that the reason for the difference in multiprocessing implementations that precipitated this was Apple not wanting to do so.

Facebook did not need to fork Android, because it is designed to support substitutable components. You can swap out any OS components, and you can communicate between apps using intents. Indeed, Facebook could make a deal with handset manufacturers or carriers that don't offer the 'with Google' experience to replace it with a Facebook one. Expect to see this in overseas markets, especially the ones where Facebook Zero works with carriers.

The more subtle thing is that forking is no longer perjorative. It used to be a last resort, what you did when your open source community had broken down. It meant that people had to pick sides, and choose which fork to adopt, because open source had a hierarchic nature. Now, forking is what you do to show interest. If you go to github, where much open source lives now, forking a project is a single click. Sucessful projects will have many forks, and will accept pull requests from some of them.

This is the real difference between the Free Software and Open Source worldviews that were debated this week - the web enables more parallel, less centralised forms of co-operation and ownership. The monolithic projects and integrations are giving way to ones with better defined boundaries between them, and the ability to combine components as needed. Which means tech companies don't get to tell each other to "Knife the baby" any more.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 19:13 8 comments:

Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Hosting and Impermanence

I linked to my boys' old blog today when Christopher asked for an April Fools prank idea, and noticed that the images were missing. This is due to the demise of iDisk, Apple's handy built-in version of DropBox that I paid them about $100/year for until they shut it down and broke all my links to it.

To fix this, I copied the old iDisk Sites folder to Google Drive, and manually changed the links in the blog posts. Then I had a thought - could I host my twitter archive this way? As you can see it works.

Here's how to do it:

  1. Download your Twitter Archive by clicking Request your archive on the Account Settings page.
  2. Install Google Drive
  3. Expand the archive and copy it into the local Google Drive folder
  4. Go to Google Drive in the browser, and set the folder to public using the Share button.
  5. Copy the URL which will be something like: https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B7cAS_dEul22V3d5c0d5WkpEOFE
  6. Edit the first part to be 'googledrive.com/host' so you get https://googledrive.com/host/0B7cAS_dEul22V3d5c0d5WkpEOFE
  7. (Optional) Go over to a URL shortener and make a short link for it like I did http://j.mp/kmtweets

Now you have your old tweets hosted on Google. Tweet a link to them.

Aha, I can just drag my Twitter archive onto Google Drive and publish it j.mp/kmtweets

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) April 2, 2013
Posted by Kevin Marks at 03:26 6 comments:
Labels: Apple, google, hosting, Twitter
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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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