[drewcrawford]

> If the Riak guys want to use leveldb in a way Google won't support, they should rally with the package managers and get Google to stop being "pretend open source."

They don't have any control over Google, by "rallying" or otherwise.

Consider the recent case of the WebKit/blink split. Here you have two sets of some of the world's smartest engineers, who cannot agree about how to render a webpage! And this is a well-defined problem. There are actual standards about how to render webpages! In theory, everybody agrees about what's going on here, and yet it's fork time.

As for what Library X does, there are no standards, and not necessarily does anybody agree about what they are building. And let's be honest here, you probably do not have WebKit-caliber developers hacking on Library X. So the chance that you can arrive at consensus for Library X is much lower than for WebKit/blink.

Meanwhile, instead of dicking around with the will-they-wont-they-merge-upstream committee, you can just ship software that works in practice to people that want to use it. If you are a software developer, and you have the choice between writing software and arguing about it, it is usually a good bet on average to write software.