
Ask HN: What's the overhead of forking and maintaining an open-source project? - riyakhanna1983
If we create an internal fork of a popular open-source project, what maintenance overhead are we looking at? Particularly, when pulling security and optimization updates?
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gregjor
Completely depends on how you change the code, from easy to very painful.

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firstbreath
I'll add another attribute: popularity. I maintained a fork of a script that
was rather complex, but had close to no feature requests and a handful of
minor bugs. On the other hand, there is a ton of great research on burnout due
to its prevalence.

One of the maintainers of some great projects wrote about taking an
"indefinite sabbatical" \- [https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-
sabbatical...](https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical-
from-my-projects/). He gets at the commitment in more detail.

The most complete resource I've found, on the good and bad, is @nayafia's
Awesome Maintainers: [https://github.com/nayafia/awesome-
maintainers](https://github.com/nayafia/awesome-maintainers)

