Yes, forking occurs. But before you, you would reach out, ask permission, offer a solution and try to come to a compromise with the original authors.
Downright forking while ignoring the original authors and then putting it out there as an independent alternative to theirs? Well, that's just entitled behavior.
The "fork" button on GitHub exist primarily to make it easier for contributors to create pull requests and contribute back to the original project. It's not meant to wholesale copy projects and run them as if they were your own.
The specific case was "maintainer fails to respond", which implies that one was reaching out. It doesn't really matter why they don't respond, perhaps the maintainer died, or they are burned out, or maybe they just don't like you.
> Downright forking while ignoring the original authors and then putting it out there as an independent alternative to theirs? Well, that's just entitled behavior.
Entitled by the very license the maintainer attached to the software. But if you meant "entitled behavior" as some kind of indicator of privilege, well, everyone has that entitlement per the license, so I'm not sure if that really counts as being entitled.
Downright forking while ignoring the original authors and then putting it out there as an independent alternative to theirs? Well, that's just entitled behavior.
The "fork" button on GitHub exist primarily to make it easier for contributors to create pull requests and contribute back to the original project. It's not meant to wholesale copy projects and run them as if they were your own.