Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
On Forking a FOSS project (haineault.com)
6 points by fogus on July 16, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



Ok, so he made changes you wanted to make but didn't get around to? Simple solution:

    git pull ...


You should really rebase, so as not to clutter up the history with meaningless merge commits.

In the author's case, he said he abandoned the project (or wasn't working on it), so it should just be a fast-forward.


Are the changes all compatible? Or are some of them incompatible for trivial reasons because "it's a fork, no reason to be compatible"?


While I was being a little glib, it probably won't be that difficult to incorporate some or all of the changes. Certainly easier than redoing them.


Two things struck me:

"Had he contact me before forking my project I would have gladly discussed with him about improvements that could be made and I would most likely had invited him to join the project."

and

"My project is currently stagnating because I don't have much spare times and I have to focus on other things for now, that said some help would have been more than welcome."

Sounds like a lose-lose situation for the forker.


Yeah, it just sounds like he wanted to have the fun of implementing something, but someone else beat him to it.


Fork early, fork often. It's the GPL that legalizes merging, past that, the worst that happens is that someone wastes their time on code that doesn't get used. If it's the fork, tough cookies for them. If it's the "original author", they can choose whether and how to benefit from the code that has been written to extend their codebase.

If you're angry that he forked your code, fork his code back into your project. Or at least the parts of it that you want. The parts you don't, leave behind. Does it burn that you didn't get to order him around on how the project should have been improved? He doesn't need your permission, get over it.


So you are telling us that someone modified the source code you released as 'open source'?? That Bastard!

And he didn't discuss this with you before? That's absolutely disgusting!!


Obviously not a DVCS user.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: