Forking: the Invisible Hand of Sustainability in Open Source Software

The ability to create and maintain high-quality software artifacts that preserve their usability over time is one of the most essential characteristics of the software business. In such a setting, open source software offers excellent examples of sustainability. In particular, safeguarding mechanisms against planned obsolescence by any single actor are built into the very definition of open source development. The most powerful of these safeguarding mechanisms is the ability to fork the project as a whole. In this position paper, we argue that the possibility to fork any open source program serves as the invisible hand of sustainability, ensuring that the code can always remain open and that the code that best fulfills the needs of the community will live on.