Re:Open-source, not open-contribution
by MaxBarraclough on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:44PM
(#25945529)
> If the software otherwise does what you want, but you need some particular change, fork away.
You'll then have to maintain the fork, re-applying your changes whenever the upstream repo is updated
It might not work with big projects but libraries and other smaller software is perfectly fine.
Obviously, one needs to be judicious with this.
Microsoft or Oracle will be glad to sell you something then. Geeze the babies around here.. not every project maintainer is going to agree with you as was apparently the crux of the original complaint. You don’t always get your way. And Apparently just having the ability to fork the source and do whatever the fuck you want is not enough for these pratts.
Obviously one needs to be judicious with this, but I've scored some big wins from this. In addition to bypassing projects who don't want to accept the (IMHO) perfectly reasonable contributions, I've also some cases where the upstream project shouldn't accept my changes and I shouldn't submit them. I've got one case where I forked a package and essentially twisted it so hard that it destroys it for its original purpose, even though it now does exactly what I need. A couple of others where the upstream is obviously dead. Another case I can think of where in principle the upstream could accept it, but it adds a subtle and easy-to-misuse feature to the package that I understand fairly well having written it, but would really encourage users to mess themselves up and is hard to document properly, so I probably won't ever submit it.
It's not something I do all the time by any means... the above paragraph describes nearly all the cases where I've done it. It's 3 or 4 in as many years. But each of them was a fairly large win.