[samus]

The impact of these forks is that the community around the main project is slowly eroded. But it doesn't really matter whether the fork brings the main project to the negotiation table. The author of TA is able and is committed to carry and maintain that patch in his local repository until the end of time. What is missing to complete such a fork is publishing that local repository.

[domq]

I have a hard time putting faith in that “balkanization theory” from the '90s anymore. A fork gains traction if and only if it manages to get ahead of the mainline feature-wise, and stay there, by a sufficiently wide margin for customers to overcome their inertia. We'll see whether this ~eshel person manages to pull that off, or not (my money is on “not”.)