3 ms·

The criticism is of forks that are done in order to re-brand and re-sell a project, and then never contribute anything back to the original, and likely, never p

by brabel 5y ago

The criticism is of forks that are done in order to re-brand and re-sell a project, and then never contribute anything back to the original, and likely, never pull improvements from the originally forked project (which can include critical bug fixes) after that.

kortilla 5y ago
Serious question, how does that hurt the original project? This has never been a concern in the projects I’ve worked on. Getting mad every time some developer writes code that didn’t go to your project is a good way to be mad all of the time.
- brendangregg 5y ago
  Just a couple of example scenarios: - Someone sells you BPF observability that's buggy and dissapointing, and you avoid BPF in the future. So in that case it's hurt the BPF community. - Funding goes to a project that gives nothing back, instead of funding a project that does. Again, it hurts the community as funding isn't infinite.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    > Someone sells you BPF observability that's buggy and dissapointing, and you avoid BPF in the future. So in that case it's hurt the BPF community. Ok, so someone sells me closed source tooling that uses BPF and it’s buggy and disappointing, so I avoid BPF in the future. This association problem exists regardless of closed source vs a fork vs an old release. > Funding goes to a project that gives nothing back, instead of funding a project that does. Again, it hurts the community as funding isn't infinite. This only hurts if it’s a closed/hidden fork. This also presumes that the fork isn’t just stripping out tons of upstream features (I’ve had to do this for clients because “security”). My view is that forks of open source (GPL in particular) should be encouraged and done in public. Iterating on central projects only is just so slow and stifling. Maybe your projects have very little churn so lots of people experimenting in parallel doesn’t make sense, but this has been my experience with larger infrastructure projects. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
- IcePic 5y ago
  Obviously it hurts if your project gets bad rep from an old unmaintained fork. If "everyone knows $your_project is broken, don't use it" it will spill back on you. Somewhat like when powershell on windows had aliases for wget and curl that was just shell aliases for a simple downloader, making some scripts work without those two installed, but also confusing anyone that wanted to do anything outside of "get one single file from url".

by brabel 5y ago

kortilla 5y ago

Serious question, how does that hurt the original project? This has never been a concern in the projects I’ve worked on. Getting mad every time some developer writes code that didn’t go to your project is a good way to be mad all of the time.

brendangregg 5y ago
Just a couple of example scenarios: - Someone sells you BPF observability that's buggy and dissapointing, and you avoid BPF in the future. So in that case it's hurt the BPF community. - Funding goes to a project that gives nothing back, instead of funding a project that does. Again, it hurts the community as funding isn't infinite.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > Someone sells you BPF observability that's buggy and dissapointing, and you avoid BPF in the future. So in that case it's hurt the BPF community. Ok, so someone sells me closed source tooling that uses BPF and it’s buggy and disappointing, so I avoid BPF in the future. This association problem exists regardless of closed source vs a fork vs an old release. > Funding goes to a project that gives nothing back, instead of funding a project that does. Again, it hurts the community as funding isn't infinite. This only hurts if it’s a closed/hidden fork. This also presumes that the fork isn’t just stripping out tons of upstream features (I’ve had to do this for clients because “security”). My view is that forks of open source (GPL in particular) should be encouraged and done in public. Iterating on central projects only is just so slow and stifling. Maybe your projects have very little churn so lots of people experimenting in parallel doesn’t make sense, but this has been my experience with larger infrastructure projects. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
IcePic 5y ago
Obviously it hurts if your project gets bad rep from an old unmaintained fork. If "everyone knows $your_project is broken, don't use it" it will spill back on you. Somewhat like when powershell on windows had aliases for wget and curl that was just shell aliases for a simple downloader, making some scripts work without those two installed, but also confusing anyone that wanted to do anything outside of "get one single file from url".