Comment by Aurornis
1 month ago
> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.
The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.
To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
I have a lot of experience with the latter kind of maintainer... some have even quit their own projects after realizing a fork existed that they don't like (especially if it's good enough to take users away from the original), but those forks were always born out of necessity when the original maintainer was toxic to work with or just kept ignoring or outright refusing PRs/issues over personal/ideological reasons.
I really don't understand why so many people will choose a specific license, and then get upset when people do exactly what it allows them to do.
I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when <corporation> doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.
In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.
Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.