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Anyone can just do it. They literally can't though. Only the owner or a maintainer has permission to merge PRs in to the main branch. Anyone can fork a repo, w

Anyone can just do it. They literally can't though. Only the owner or a maintainer has permission to merge PRs in to the main branch. Anyone can fork a repo, write a patch, and PR it, but that's where outside contributions stop. It still takes someone from the original team to accept a contribution. Forking a project and then maintaining that fork as a separate project is an option, but it's divisive one that a lot of the community will react badly to if they see it as a hostile takeover or if there's a change in goal (eg making a commercial product out of the abandoned project.)

ricardobeat 5y ago
There are endless examples of forks that pick up where some other project left off. They give it a new name, explain what's going on, and move on. If it's seen as hostile, that means the original project is still active and doesn't need this?
- cbm-vic-20 5y ago
  This has happened with some pretty big names, too. gcc did this, and so did Jenkins. Didn't node.js do this a few years ago, too?
h2odragon 5y ago
There's version control other that Git / GitHub / etc. It's even possible to forego version control and just release tarballs somewhere.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Ok, but you'd hope there's some form of access control that stops someone just overwriting the canonical source with their own version. That's the same as the maintainer having to accept changes. If there isn't, and anyone can write straight to the source, then good luck to anyone using that package because it's probably not very safe.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    Or you maintain your own version. My projects got booted of GitHub when I did; I don't maintain a site anymore; but there's several forked versions of them floating out there somewhere, presumably because someone's still using them.
ericb 5y ago
This is a serious shortcoming in github's current UI. There's no easy discovery for which forks are active. It would be useful if there was a checkbox "Actively Publicly Maintained" in forked repos that defaults to Off. That way, on the forks page of a repo, if someone is offering an alternative, an "actively maintained" check mark (and perhaps a date) can be shown and it can bubble to the top of the "forks" list.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  There is a graph showing the fork activity. Also, the setting you are thinking if is probably “archive”.
  - ericb 5y ago
    A fork having activity doesn't imply it is a publicly maintained fork that people can rally around. Many of forks are made for personal purposes, experiments, one offs to patch bugs, to keep an eye on a project, or other reasons. I'm thinking of the opposite of "archive" -- a setting that means "I nominate myself to become the lead repo for the community to rally around should the community be interested. On this repo, can you tell me which fork the community moved to for this dead project? https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/network/members https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/network/member...
    - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      All valid points. I do miss some sort of guidance every now and then on some repos. The most difficult bit starts when multiple forks have different features one wants to have in their own fork. It would be awesome if there was a way on github to say "give me the upstream with this repo cherry pick, this repo cherry pick". But that might be pretty difficult to implement.
- account42 5y ago
  Even just finding out which forks have any changes compared to the main repo is difficult on GitHub.

ricardobeat 5y ago

There are endless examples of forks that pick up where some other project left off. They give it a new name, explain what's going on, and move on. If it's seen as hostile, that means the original project is still active and doesn't need this?

cbm-vic-20 5y ago
This has happened with some pretty big names, too. gcc did this, and so did Jenkins. Didn't node.js do this a few years ago, too?

h2odragon 5y ago

There's version control other that Git / GitHub / etc. It's even possible to forego version control and just release tarballs somewhere.

onion2k 5y ago
Ok, but you'd hope there's some form of access control that stops someone just overwriting the canonical source with their own version. That's the same as the maintainer having to accept changes. If there isn't, and anyone can write straight to the source, then good luck to anyone using that package because it's probably not very safe.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Or you maintain your own version. My projects got booted of GitHub when I did; I don't maintain a site anymore; but there's several forked versions of them floating out there somewhere, presumably because someone's still using them.

ericb 5y ago

This is a serious shortcoming in github's current UI. There's no easy discovery for which forks are active. It would be useful if there was a checkbox "Actively Publicly Maintained" in forked repos that defaults to Off. That way, on the forks page of a repo, if someone is offering an alternative, an "actively maintained" check mark (and perhaps a date) can be shown and it can bubble to the top of the "forks" list.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
There is a graph showing the fork activity. Also, the setting you are thinking if is probably “archive”.
- ericb 5y ago
  A fork having activity doesn't imply it is a publicly maintained fork that people can rally around. Many of forks are made for personal purposes, experiments, one offs to patch bugs, to keep an eye on a project, or other reasons. I'm thinking of the opposite of "archive" -- a setting that means "I nominate myself to become the lead repo for the community to rally around should the community be interested. On this repo, can you tell me which fork the community moved to for this dead project? https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/network/members https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/network/member...
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    All valid points. I do miss some sort of guidance every now and then on some repos. The most difficult bit starts when multiple forks have different features one wants to have in their own fork. It would be awesome if there was a way on github to say "give me the upstream with this repo cherry pick, this repo cherry pick". But that might be pretty difficult to implement.
account42 5y ago
Even just finding out which forks have any changes compared to the main repo is difficult on GitHub.