> 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 “ 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.