Comment by blihp
7 years ago
No, there's no reason to do it in private. If you look around there are plenty of people who publicly fork code bases and work together independently of the original project with no drama. It could be they just want to go in a different direction, or to play, or didn't like the original group etc. They own their repo(s), get to decide who's invited in and if they even have a forum/mailing list/whatever. Been that way for decades.
That's not to say there aren't very public forks of important projects: they happen all the time. (just a few: Emacs/XEmacs, GCC/EGCS, FFmpeg/Libav, Cyanogenmod/LineageOS) If those who did the fork are right, the new project tends to supersede the original. And when there's a fork because one or more of the controlling personalities is an asshole, it tends to be public, noisy and messy. Note: the Linus/lkml thing barely moves the needle on this scale. (i.e. it's public, but there really hasn't been a lot of noise or mess to date.) Also, Linus is a complete gentleman compared to some of the situations I've read about.
There is a reason to do it in private: So you don't have to deal with the general public and the questions they might ask.
There's no requirement that projects listen to feedback or provide support, though the most successful ones generally do. There are many projects that simply ignore user and developer feedback. That's often a reason people fork.