Comment by Aurornis
10 hours ago
A lot of edge cases on this list. Among projects I've used it's almost always maintainers losing interest or vanishing.
Forking is always suggested as a solution, but some projects treat forks as hostile attempts to steal their project. I've hit fork deadlock before where a maintainer didn't want to merge important requests, but also became exceedingly hostile to anyone who tried to fork the project. If a maintainer treats the project and its users as their little empire, the situation is bound to get sad.
It seems not at all surprising that the “other side” of a fork would view it somewhat negatively. The person planning the fork presumably views the mainline project maintainers somewhat negatively in that moment as well.
They can be as hostile as they want; that seems nearly irrelevant to the fork decision. If the mainline won’t take a patch or wants to go in a different direction, forking seems perfectly valid and they can keep their empire. That seems fine; they didn’t want to go east, the fork going east means that those users who also want to go east can be served.
> The person planning the fork presumably views the mainline project maintainers somewhat negatively in that moment as well.
This isn’t necessary. Maybe not even common. Forks can start as a testing ground or an experimental feature fork and grow from there.
We see headlines about the angry forks, but usually it’s just friendly differences.
The problems arise when one person wants to control the project, deny contributions, but also gets angry when someone forks the project to implement those things. They put the open source license on the repo but didn’t expect other people to actually do open source things with it.
As a maintainer of a fork I don't think this is true. Upstream is perfectly fine and nice people, just with different needs than my community. So rather than try to scope creep their nice project, we work on a fork. Everyone wins.
If the license is open source there's nothing a maintainer can do except whine when you fork. Stick your fingers in yours (metaphorical) ears and keep on working.