Enlightened

An open source project is a living entity that evolves and expands based on the collective efforts of a community. For some users, the project keeps on getting better, but sometimes a portion of the community is left behind. In particular, for many users, progress means adding more features to the software and building in more complexity to accommodate advances in the hardware. Other users, however, find elegance in simplicity, and the gradual expansion and evolution of a codebase eventually leads to untenable levels of complexity, bugs, and bloat.

When this happens, the developers often part company and "fork" the codebase. The project thus becomes two projects, with two development teams pursuing different visions.

One well known example of this phenomenon in the desktop space is the Mate desktop, a fork of the Gnome 2 codebase, which was created for users who didn't like the change from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3.

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