How not to fork an open source project
3 comments
Yeah, he probably didn’t actually didnt develop anything. Saying he’s “been working on this for a while” impies he built it from scratch or actualy make some changes, but it’s really just a fork. and the disclaimer like “AI-assisted code completion, some human validation” implies that he used ai. Most Redditors probably wouldn’t even know how Git or GitHub works to notice. and also the video is very very similar to openscreen
Unlike OP, I don't think forks are great. Far too many forks happen when they shouldn't. In this case, it feels like the original project was hijacked just because it lacked a feature this person wanted.
Many forks can confuse the market and fracture adoption. A dozen different projects, each with slightly different features, is harmful in my opinion. A fork should be done as a last resort. With AI, it may become just another knee jerk reaction.
Many forks can confuse the market and fracture adoption. A dozen different projects, each with slightly different features, is harmful in my opinion. A fork should be done as a last resort. With AI, it may become just another knee jerk reaction.
The fork itself is not the problem, but presenting it as your own project. Put the upstream link high in the README, say clearly what you actually changed and don't bury attributions just at the bottom.
> I've been working on this for quite a while now after getting tired of the monopoly Screen Studio has on screen recordings. I didn't see any free screen recorders that actually offered the same motion blur animations and zoom animations as Screen Studio, so I decided to create an app with the missing features.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1rsf44t/os_i_made_a_free_opensource_screen_studio/)
Reading this, gives the impression that the author built the project entirely from scratch. Looking at the GitHub project shows that it's forked and many of the forked commits are simply rebranding and adding donation links. They don't mention that it's a fork in the reddit post and looking at the project's README.md it "credits" the original project exactly once at the very end, not even providing a link.
Please don't get me wrong — I think forks are great and completely valid. However, I do think such behavior is misleading, damaging the community and frankly disrespectful to the original project. The person forking the project did nothing wrong from a legal perspective, but I think it's questionable from a moral/ethical point of view.
Why am I sharing this? With the rise of AI-assisted coding, I think we will see a lot more forks - which is great. However, I think it's important to preserve some moral/ethical guidelines and credit the people who deserve the credit, even when you are not required to based on the license.
Btw, it's not my intention to publicly blame the person - I have already asked them to properly acknowledge/credit the original project via comment and DM. This is about sharing how not to promote a forked project.