Topic: to fork or not to fork

[lokedhs]

If you are building a product (open or closed source) and use an open source product to provide some basic functionality, you may find yourself in a situation where your usage of said product deviates from the evolution of the product itself. Perhaps you need a new feature that the maintainer of the open source project does not want.

At this point, you can either work around it, or you can fork and make the necessary changes yourself. This is sometimes a very difficult decision, and possibly something that could be discussed on the podcast.

[bagder]

I've personally once forked a project when I created @c-ares. Basically every Linux distro runs "forks" of many upstream projects when they collect and maintain an ever increasing number of local patches to save them from having to upgrade and yet fix bugs and security vulnerabilities.

But yes, forks is a fun topic!