Comment by Aurornis

> you have the right to do that work without kowtowing to the authority of other people who did the work before you ("just fork it").

> The important point lost in many of these anti-fork posts is that forks usually aren't hostile, and "just fork it" isn't usually a dismissal of people's input

In my experience, forking a semi-active project can often be viewed as hostile by the maintainers. Some of those maintainers may turn it into a holy war where they try to throw their weight around to push back on the fork. I’ve seen claims of “trying to stealing our project” to mobilizing users of their Discord to warn people to avoid the fork across Reddit and other social media.

It doesn’t always go that way, as you experienced with the project you forked. The situation you described is about as non-threatening as it gets, though, because you forked for a single client and you don’t want to become a maintainer of a new project.