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I really did feel the same way as the author for a long time, but I haven't yet seen any of my fears manifest in practice. The vast majority of forks die withou
by xdissent 15y ago
I really did feel the same way as the author for a long time, but I haven't yet seen any of my fears manifest in practice. The vast majority of forks die without fanfare after serving some singular purpose. People who want to contribute code do so more easily than ever. People who fight over ownership of open source projects are just jerks like they've always been. There may be more of them, or more of them are more visible now that we all use Github, but I consider this a trivial downside of an otherwise remarkable ecosystem.
- jaggederest 15y agoI've seen smooth transitions between de facto ownership of projects a ton, but never a bitter divide where both ends are actively maintained. One pathological example is delayed_job, which has changed 'leadership' a few times over the years. It's still pretty easy to look at the 'network' graph and choose the endpoint you want... or just use the published gem.
- xdissent 15y agoI've been the leader of a project I assumed from another guy that he assumed from yet another guy and then the original guy even assumed leadership back after a while. No one missed a beat. If you're involved in this community, you are most likely capable of tracking down the "correct" fork. Unfortunately, the "published gem" part is the one that has given me the most trouble historically. But now that pretty much everyone uses bundler for gems this should be a nonissue - you can even specify a branch of a fork that you'd like to build.