[setr]

>Forks are inevitable; why would you want to discourage them?

The epitome of this mindset I think is "hostile fork" -- the entire notion is nonsensical. The whole point of being FOSS/OSS is the freedom to fork -- by all damn rights, you should fork as you please, and be pleased to fork!

The actual problem is not forking.. its community fragmentation, and more importantly loss of a "source of truth". Of course, maintaining that source of truth is otherwise known as centralization, with all the problems that brings, but there's nothing inherently wrong with forking.. that's just the natural specialization and evolutionary processes at work.

The solution is to make it easier to find those top-tier libraries, and this is orthogonal to forking; mainly handled by blog posts and "official" library listings/recommendations, and things like This Week in Rust.... namespacing or not doesn't really get you anything there.

[PuercoPop]

> "hostile fork" -- the entire notion is nonsensical.

It is not. It is based in experience. See the xMule/aMule fork. A hostile fork is when the fork project starts bad-mouthing the original project and its maintainers.

The notion that forking is by itself hostile is non-sense.

[nitrogen]

If I'm remembering right, something similar kind of happened with uBlock and uBlock Origin, but it was the original maintainer who came back and forked after the new maintainer became hostile, or something like that.

[hyperman1]

This was discussed in detail in Homesteading the Noosphere of Eric S Raymond.

I think it's in there somewhere that he compares the right to fork with the right to bear arms: Good to have, but the situation must have gotten really shitty if a fork is a good solution.

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/14...