Loved this article. The focus on social concerns above technical ones is extremely refreshing, and a necessary step forward our culture needs to take in order to survive with any sort of dignity... The fragility/ephemerality of all kinds of software weighs heavily on me.
FOSS "just fork it" delusion
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#22It is not a delusion. It happens all the time.
For example, 3 months ago developers of GZDoom didn't like where it heads, so forked it to UZDoom (vide https://github.com/ZDoom/gzdoom/issues/3395 and https://www.techspot.com/news/109864-gzdoom-developers-split...).
The core part is if you can find enough contributors (from the original repo, or new ones) to make it viable.
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#23The subtext here is that there's a difference between someone saying "I don't like this community, I'm going to make my own" and "I don't like this community, I'm going to change it". Building communities is hard. It's not obvious why someone who wants a community on their terms gets to piggyback on an existing community rather than putting the effort in to make their own. The point of "just fork it" is that if your…
Every community is the sum of its members. Each person who joins changes it, at least a bit. And each of those members is changing and growing. When community members have different needs, forking should be a last resort. It's expensive, and it's wasteful unless two different groups have irreconcilable needs. It should only ever be suggested as a last resort, after other options have been exhausted. However, it's oft…
I imagine with coding agents, maintaining private forks (reapplying patches on upgrade) will be a lot easier. Though, a plugin architecture would be better, where feasible.
If there there's a big enough community swapping patches that upstream isn't accepting for some reason, that's when a public fork becomes reasonable. (This is the Apache web server's origin story.)
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every community is the sum of its members. Each person who joins changes it, at least a bit. And each of those members is changing and growing. When community members have different needs, forking should be a last resort. It's expensive, and it's wasteful unless two different groups have irreconcilable needs. It should only ever be suggested as a last resort, after other options have been exhausted. However, it's oft…
I rarely see good faith engagements being immediately shut down with "just fork it" (you'd never accept issues / MRs!). Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way and starts whining about it. If a change is proposed that's completely counter to a community's stated values, then I guess "fork it" is a more appropriate immediate response, because it's hard to see how such a cl…
> Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way
I am not saying the phrase can't be used legitimately. Like the article's author, I just think it's often used in a way that isn't. Perhaps we're sampling from different areas of open-source culture, but when I think specifically of HN, I think just-fork-it style responses of the kind that the author is criticizing are common.
> A community is much more than the sum of it's members.
Sure, I agree with that. But you write it as if it's in contradiction with my point, which I'm not seeing.
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#25I think the wisdom of "just fork it" is that in a project the power lies with the people who do the work (yes, that power is often rented out in exchange for a pay cheque), and in an open source project 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'…
Well said. Open source helps with agency, freedom of association, and voluntary action.
Maintainers have the freedom to choose whether to accept an idea or not. Users have the freedom to fork or not.
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#26Part of the problem is the maintenance cost of a fork just in terms of merging upstream commits.
It won't be long at all before this becomes a huge amount of work for a relatively small divergence of the code. But we could build tools that would make it much less awful!
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#27In other words, forking punishes poorly managed projects by depriving them of some fraction of their developers, users, and mindshare, and that's fascism?
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#28I think the wisdom of "just fork it" is that in a project the power lies with the people who do the work (yes, that power is often rented out in exchange for a pay cheque), and in an open source project 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'…
Yes exactly. I've forked many a library to meet my own needs. Usually temporary, but not always. The fact that I can do this when I have to means I can use basically any library. The submitted post is written from the perspective of some kind of social network project. People saying "just fork it" in that perspective are clearly missing the bigger picture, hence the post. And the author of that post, didn't acknowledge that FOSS is much more varied than their particular project.
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#29I think the wisdom of "just fork it" is that in a project the power lies with the people who do the work (yes, that power is often rented out in exchange for a pay cheque), and in an open source project 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'…
in 30+ years of software development i've never heard "just fork it" or "you're welcome to fork it" used as an encouragement and i've heard it as a dismissal countless times. the article is spot on, and your interpretation of the described real-life situation is a rosy-tinted hypothetical at best.
Re: FOSS "just fork it" delusion
#30Judging from the comments here, I think the article would be improved by discussing actual examples of the "just fork it" debate, because commenters seem to be reading different interpretations and different situations into this expression, and I'm not sure that's how the article author was interpreting it.
that would turn it into a witch hunt drama post. it's good that this sort of thing wasn't included.