[wpietri]

Every community is the sum of its members. Each person who joins changes it, at least a bit. And each of those members is changing and growing.

When community members have different needs, forking should be a last resort. It's expensive, and it's wasteful unless two different groups have irreconcilable needs. It should only ever be suggested as a last resort, after other options have been exhausted.

However, it's often used as a first resort to shut down criticism and to protect existing power structures. The person who speaks up is, as here, treated as an outsider and an exploiter.

[growse]

I rarely see good faith engagements being immediately shut down with "just fork it" (you'd never accept issues / MRs!). Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way and starts whining about it.

If a change is proposed that's completely counter to a community's stated values, then I guess "fork it" is a more appropriate immediate response, because it's hard to see how such a clash could be resolved without fundamental change.

Edit

> Every community is the sum of its members

A community is much more than the sum of it's members.

[wpietri]

> Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way

I am not saying the phrase can't be used legitimately. Like the article's author, I just think it's often used in a way that isn't. Perhaps we're sampling from different areas of open-source culture, but when I think specifically of HN, I think just-fork-it style responses of the kind that the author is criticizing are common.

> A community is much more than the sum of it's members.

Sure, I agree with that. But you write it as if it's in contradiction with my point, which I'm not seeing.

[skybrian]

I imagine with coding agents, maintaining private forks (reapplying patches on upgrade) will be a lot easier. Though, a plugin architecture would be better, where feasible.

If there there's a big enough community swapping patches that upstream isn't accepting for some reason, that's when a public fork becomes reasonable. (This is the Apache web server's origin story.)