While doing my routine log review I noticed a handful of hits to Watershed Studio coming from the web site of Benji Smith. Since I had no idea who this was I decided to look into it and found out that Mr. Smith had forked Watershed’s WordPress Versioning Plugin.
This has me asking the question, what ettique should people take when forking open source projects?
License wise, yes, you can do pretty much whatever you want without asking the author(s). But in the past *every* person who has made updates or changes to software that I have written has notified me of the changes and have either asked permission to place it for download on their web site (if the changes signifficgantly changed the functionality) or if I’d like to incorporate the changes in a new version of the software (giving credit where credit is due).
While the forking without notice does irritate me a little bit, the cheap “dumb” and “beta” insults he throws in is what truly irritates me. I mean, come on, how pompous is that? If you want to improve the software, fine. But if you want to knock the original code why not start from scratch and write your own software?
I have no problem admitting that this BETA software is very rough (to say the least) and has been on the backburner for quite a while. But functionality wise, this does serve it’s purpose for what I needed, albeit not very pretty.
Anyway, enough of that nonsense. Bottom line, if you want to fork my software, please ask first. Just because it hasn’t been updated in a while doesn’t mean that it’s dead.
UPDATE
It just occured to me that about 99% of the people who read my blog are probably thinking to themselves, “What in the world is ‘forking’?”
Simply put, forking is taking someone else’s software code base and creating your own software based upon the previous work.
Clear as mud now?
