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There are forks like those that happened to PHPNuke. To overcome technical limitations, limited architecture etc.
Then there are the personality based forks.
Guess what? It's sad to see a product with much potential being torn apart and forked because of litigations and not because of technological problems.
Don't tell me it's impossible to merge the forces to make a cool looking AND secure AND light weight API Xoops, because you know the truth, it's BS. From the (possibly uninformed but that's what you have) "end user" point of view, all of this is just an huge egos war.
And know what? My company that relied on XOOPS after the big PostNuke drama will have to move to other products. We are already discussing it, and I am being hold responsible for the "bad choice" (we invested about 2 man years in XOOPS based works that have to be kept up to date and security patched etc. etc.).
Serious operations need to know that they are not wasting time, money and effort and research in something that will implode to dust - the uncertainty is after all what keeps big companies from going full open source (the ethernal question: "what if this critical application dies / becomes obsolete and no updates are done? Who wants to be responsible for it?".
In my humblest opinion, uncontrolled forks galore are one the biggest open source projects killers.
Sure, a fork may lead to a better product. May.
But how many forks water down projects till they smear into oblivion?
Sorry for the harsh post. I am pissed a lot. And in trouble in my job because of this sorry event.
