

Fear of forking - cstuder
http://krow.livejournal.com/698497.html

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mxcl
<http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew> is my project. IMO anyone who is afraid of
forking is actually just afraid of losing control. It's much easier now for
people to do a better job than you. You have to work harder in order to keep
your kudos. That guy who has submitted 20 patches a month since 2005 could in
theory attract more attention than you and everyone would start using their
fork.

I'm probably 50% right.

~~~
Dylanlacey
It's fame VS value, though.

You incubated the original idea, and to some that's more valuable then
improving the technicalities. Ideas are cheap but initial execution is hard.

On the flip side, for a whole other bunch of people, continued improvement is
hard, so the maintainers are the heroes in that instance.

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wccrawford
If people are forking your project instead of giving you patches, it probably
means 1 of 3 things:

1) You aren't going the direction they think you should go. If this is the
case, you don't want the patch anyhow.

2) You have made it too hard to submit patches. They actually found it easier
to manage the project themselves rather than go through your patch submission
process. Ouch.

3) They think you're doing a bad job as project manager. They would never
submit the patch to you anyhow, so nothing is lost by them forking.

And don't forget that if you want the patch, their fork is going to be under
the same license, so you can just go grab it from their repo.

~~~
devmonk
In GitHub, that's not the case. People often fork Rails, etc. to make a change
that they need locally but will push that (easily) back up to the main project
for consideration. Forking allows you and others to easily work with your
patched version without even having to wait on the original project. For the
project owner that wants sole control of a project, GitHub might not be the
right choice. But for those that want other to easily be able to make changes
and provide those changes to others, GitHub is great.

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substack
Since the article uses evolution metaphors, how about this: forks can be a
good way to help organisms (read: projects) navigate a complex multivariate
fitness landscape. Abandoned forks then serve as concrete markers of
particular design decisions that can be revisited later if a similar kind of
problem comes up.

We often don't know ahead of time how a decision will work out, so calling
these forks "wasted effort" seems to miss their utility as experiments that
can drive the direction of future development indirectly.

~~~
Dylanlacey
Each fork is a marker of someone who took something to a new place and showed
it something it'd never seen before.

On the way, they probably learned something they didn't know.

That seems like a more then acceptable outcome.

