It's not really that simple, actually. This does happen, but every open source project curates the patches they receive for a variety of reasons (technical grounds, legal issues and personality issues). Also, most forks wind up being mere dev copies of little interest beyond as being a source of potential insight.
And there's other issues relating to the success of a project (documentation and support, for example). But, yes, being able to fork the project (and, thus, sustain community efforts) was one of the points of open source. That, along with a variety of economic, legal, moral and ethical issues. It's probably most useful to think of open source as a positive sum gift economy (though this can be overdone, for example in malware / spam contexts where someone tries to remove the recipient's right to choose). Thanks, -- Raul On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 3:33 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all ! > > I want to give a reminder about an implicit rule when you use open source. > > According to my experience, if the supplier or the current development > community does not accept patches so that the users can fullfill their > requirements, the project will be forked and a new company or a new > development community will form which makes it possible for the users to > fulfill their requirements. > > Cheers, > > Erling Hellenäs > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
