Comment by shkkmo

Forking is inherent to open source methodology, however many open source projects depend on a community of contributors and users to maintain the project, fund it, and push it forward.

While a simple personal fork of a repository/codebase is not very aggressive, forking a community (or attempting to) is a pretty significant step that will almost always create drama and bad feelings.

Working to communicate and resolve issues before attempting a fork of the community is always a good idea since they should be avoided when possible.

While the owners of an open source project absolutely have the legal rights to do as they wish, if those owners are interested in maintaining a community around their project, it behooves them to listen to that community, especially to those who have put their own time and effort into that project and community.