Lobsters,
I’d like to understand where your experiences from the open source world can help inform behaviours in other domains, when it comes to the issues around the point a project forks.
Generally, I want to understand the social dynamics of the two groups in a fork that arises because of a disagreement, and the perception of the broader community of ‘users’ as it relates to the trust in the ‘brand’ during a fork. I’d like to explore if open source principles map to other domains to reduce potential conflicts. Specifically, if there are many people involved in an enterprise which is non-profit and which has a strong brand, what happens if the group needs to split naturally because of a disagreement, but both sides want to use the brand. The assumption in the question being that there is a fear in one group that the other will damage the brand and therefore an effort to retain control in some way.
How do open source two groups manage ‘rebranding’ when this happens, and in this context, is ‘brand’ even important to open source projects?
Do open source projects have facilities for retaining control of ‘brand’?
(My thanks for your understanding if I’m confusing ‘open source’ with for example the conditions in licenses such as GPL, I hope my question is clear)
The open source brand is controlled by whoever controls the project website (or github account, or whatever). It’s hard for two projects to have the same name. Only one example project can own example.org.
A rival fork could set up shop at example.com, but I think that’s generally considered a dick move. The upstart fork also has its own reasons to rename and rebrand, to get out from the parents shadow.
I generally think projects care rather little about the brand, in the sense that ten years of brand history means very little. The upstart perhaps faces an uphill battle in the beginning, but then they are the new hotness, everybody switches over, and the original becomes a punchline.