> > If I fork it, I'll have to change the library name, and that will make me > incompatible with the rest of the world--all downstream consumers including > my own.
^ Is an assumption. You could start with the fork on GitHub 'as is' and make one tiny addition to the resulting linkable object. Specifically add a "-gh" to the resulting binary name. Engage the ASF (you kind of are already) as you go. Keep going with that until someone has a better idea, which may include breathing life into Xalan-C at the ASF again (or not) and consuming the changes back. Maybe get all the contribs to the forked one to be copyright-granted to you, so that you may later easily copyright grant (and CLA) them to Apache. Copyright grant isn't a exclusivity statement, by the way. There was some kerfuffle on copyrights when *Apache Geronimo *was created in 2003 and contributors had to rake over the history of certain source files in order to claim "I authored this originally and later gave a copyright grant to a legal entity, and now want to do the same to the ASF for the same source from back then". Not forks as such necessarily, but *libc* hs plenty of maintained-divergence alternates - http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html Note, I'm not an officer of the ASF it has to be said so I'm only saying what I'd do if I personally cared enough about a library and couldn't wait for meetings and decisions to happen. -ph
