Comment by IshKebab
1 day ago
Not really. That solution only works if you are willing to maintain your fork forever just for your one patch, and you're happy to build the software yourself every time you need it and it's a "leaf" project (e.g. it's not good if you want to add a feature to Linux and it only exists on your machine).
This answer is very much like "well if you don't like Trump you're free to live in another country!". Technically true.. ish. Practically dumb as hell.
The "willing to maintain your work" forever is the crux here - the open-source contributor is doing some amount of work to bring their contribution in line with the expectations of the repository, but it's up to the repository's maintainers to decide if they want to take on the work of maintaining that contribution forever. And that asymmetry exactly what TFA is about.
If there's great features missing form a library which are out of scope for the library, you have options - fork it, make a new library depending on the other one, launch a new linux distribution, and so on. These options require taking on the long-term work that the other library is saying (implicitly) that they don't want to do.
Libraries /should/ be tightly scoped and think hard about serving broad use-cases with simple API's: Otherwise maintenance, documentation, and discoverability of features become nightmares. It's also completely OK for composition to happen, as new libraries serve new sets of features for their own specific use cases, with dependencies on existing work. It's an ecosystem! It's ok!