[jerf]

I see all these people complaining about Elm limiting privileges to certain Github projects. A sensible complaint. But why hasn't anyone simply forked Elm, made the small tweak to make the check function return true or whatever, and offer that as a download/patch to the community?

I understand that defaults matter and that can have a large impact on the flow of libraries and code and stuff... my point is more, if you've got production code bases on this language, or at least, did 6 years ago, why so helpless? Nothing makes the point that an open source project can't dictate to its customers like the customers taking the "open source" part seriously.

I don't actually expect that to "work". What I expect to happen is that in the second-order effects that it would resolve this matter one way or the other once and for all. Either the core language realizes they need to accept the change, or the community works around the blocker, or the core language goes closed source and removes all doubt and people can move on, including their production services.