> Why does it have to be like this?

Because motivated, high performing people need to have control over their own destiny. Because cookie-cutter solutions which work for 90% of use cases are often worse than something explicitly tuned for you.

People having specific needs, getting frustrated and then solving their problem is a feature of opensource code. Its not a bug. It is the engine of innovation and improvement. Forking means we can both get what we want, even if our needs are contradictory or we don't want to work together.

This happens with commercial offerings too - but its a mess. You can't just fork the code without paying (or sometimes at all). And every fork is private, so work is duplicated and collective learning doesn't happen. Expensive consulting-ware might be the best case outcome.

The ability of motivated people to fork projects and have their own spin on things is one of the biggest strengths of opensource. May the best forks win.

Does it have to be so disrespectful, though? Demanding things, getting frustrated when denied and ghosting the original project to the point even they are surprised when a fork shows up?

There is always too sides to a story. We don't know what pressures the FB engineers were under and the problems they were trying to solve resulting in them "demanding" changes. In the end I think everyone wins with the forking.

> Because motivated, high performing people need to have control over their own destiny.

This opinion seems to be peculiar to software and I think it has something to do with the fact that software is one of the few verticals where you can (attempt to) intellectualize everything.

Having control over your own destiny in any other skilled labor job seems to be 98% about finding a brand and model of tool that works the way you do, and 2% building your own tools or jigs for that specialty task nobody thought to build a tool for.

In software it's anywhere from 90:10 to 10:90 depending on how much emotional baggage your coworkers are carrying around.

> Because motivated, high performing people need to have control over their own destiny.

I don't quite buy this: Those same "motivated, high performing people" don't seem to have anywhere near the same "need to have control over their own destiny" when it comes to the commercial closed-source tools they use.

Really?

I’ve seen people reinvent the wheel all over the place because their tools weren’t quite working for them. This instinct is the reason most good software has APIs - so you don’t have to ditch the tool entirely to customise it to your workflow. And most medium to large companies have all sorts of wacky customisations on top of existing software.

Eg perforce at Google. Well, everything at Google. And a friend at a big broadcaster has a bunch of company specific plugins for Reaper for their audio editing pipeline. And everyone insists on customising Jira.

IME there's at most one of those wheel-reinventors for each zillion devs unthinkingly swallowing whatever (VSC) Microsoft is spurting down their throats this week.

I have been using fossil for my own local projects. Super easy to set the fossil UI up behind nginx for small teams. Been enjoying it.

Because that's how progress slowly happens? If I have an issue with something, and come up with a possible solution, and then ask why it's not actually done like that... Either other people tell me I'm wrong and explain why, or they agree and things get better.