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  • Göktuğ Kayaalplibrarysquirrel@sunny.garden
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:18 PM

    In amongst these knee-jerk reactions, the impulse to fork is the most sensible, as it is akin to an actual protest or strike, but that requires organisation, willpower, commitment, goals, infrastructure, people.

    People seem to think it's easy to fork something like Linux. It's not? It's not a fork when you clone some source code over to another server. GitHub etc have trivialised the word I guess, because their absurd web based patch submission model abuses the word. "Forks" on Github are just wasteful clones.

    An actual fork is an attempt to spin up a new collaborative project. A hostile fork is a form of protest and an attempt at occupying and taking over infrastructure, because SOFTWARE IS INFRASTRUCTURE. Software is not a product. It's not a consumable.

    When you declare (for) a fork you should understand what kind of commitment it is. You should know what you're doing. You should be able to foster or provide the necessary expertise to take over and continue an existing thing that already has momentum and an ecosystem around it.

    Otherwise you're wasting everyone's time.

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Replies

  • Göktuğ Kayaalplibrarysquirrel@sunny.garden
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:03 PM

    I am generally predisposed to giving some benefit of the doubt to people who object a bit too enthusiastically to what I say, but at least try and make it about what I say... especially if you are gonna insult me.

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  • Göktuğ Kayaalplibrarysquirrel@sunny.garden
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:52 PM

    A pervasive problem amidst tech(ie) people is that they don't understand how the rest of people use computers, and that their ways are exceptional and in the grand schemes of things, unimportant.

    Yes you can make computing work on an incomplete or unsupported platform, I can too. It's fun (or it was, rather...) and somebody has to do it, but that doesn't mean it's the elephant in the room.

    We're no longer in a world where software and computing is an optional extra or an hobby. It's become the main conveyor of bureaucracy and business, it's become an inescapable hydra. I can't book a doctor appt or apply to a job without a functional computer AND phone. I probably just got excluded from a much needed scholarship due to a bug in their MOBILE APP which is the main way of applying to the scholarship and there's no way of handing in a physical application. They're talking of making ATMs refuse cards here and requiring QR codes for withdrawals etc.

    And that matters more than our dotfiles.

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  • Elda Kingeldaking@weirder.earth
    Oct 14, 2026, 2:20 PM

    @librarysquirrel The entire ideology of "open source" leads in this direction of "just fork it". It is all about the source code (and the license), you need to have the code to change the software, you need permission to change the software... and nothing else.

    What about the governance, the trust, the project members, the documentation, the channels of communication, the partnerships, the third-party support, the technical standards. For such big projects, the staff and the brand and the donors and the conferences. The existing Linux source code is not the bottleneck.

    It treats software as an artifact, a thing that just exists there, you can just have your copy, change it, and it is done. Instead of a project and a piece of infrastructure. You can change the source code! And when the source code changes tomorrow, what do you do. What do you do about the millions of copies of the old source code.

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  • FoolishOwlfoolishowl@social.coop
    Oct 16, 2026, 9:15 PM

    @eldaking @librarysquirrel It's extremely common for leads of open source projects to reject complaints with some variation of, "If you don't like it, you can fork it". I read such a response to a bug report literally a minute ago. So this is less a misconception, than a dogma, and one now forced on us from above.

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  • CohenTheBluecohentheblue@ohai.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 11:56 PM

    @foolishowl @eldaking @librarysquirrel That is where such a response will have to lead to. The fork can have a different philosophy and there isn't much else to do (in the framework of the current society and law) when the response is "just fork it". Democratic institutions are complex and slow due to that, Debian is a good example in software.

    "Forced dogma" is not the way to think about this IMO, different people have different priorities. Control is number 1 for some. Hence no democracy.

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