[em-bee]

the last thing i want is to get into drama with developers of a project, so if my choices are to give up and leave or fork and face drama, then i'll give up and leave.

how that affects the Open Source status of a project is irrelevant, this is simply not a project that i could use, and thus for all intents and purposes, for me at least, it's a project that can't be forked.

[kazinator]

If you fork quietly, you can avoid the drama. Just do your thing and don't respond to anyone (in any forum) who isn't reasonable and civil. Don't start drama, don't feed drama.

[em-bee]

if i am happy to just quietly run my private patched version, sure. but that's not the point, because the claim is that for a good Open Source (or Free Software) project, it must be possible to go public, and once you do that, if the original developers are unsympathetic then drama is unavoidable.

there have been hostile forks in projects before, even those that eventually had a good ending. egcs for example.

i was part of such a forked project too. it wasn't meant to be hostile, and the drama was limited to the project leaders, but it happened, and feelings got hurt.

not everyone is willing to take that risk.