Comment by wolvesechoes
6 months ago
Hm, there is also an option to avoid creating yet another fork the moment someone said something unpopular, or to try helping improve existing solutions instead of creating yet another cool project that achieves nothing.
Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.
Forks happen, I think, because someone doesn't agree with the direction or can't get accepted into the clique of people working on something.
So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.
I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.
That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.
Graceful forking is different than .. what too often happens with keyboard warrioring.