I agree with A and B, but C just feels like gate-keeping. Open source license do not require collaboration with the original authors. You can freely fork any opensource codebase and modify it as you wish without asking someones permission.
I think the author means: if you're maintaining changes in your fork indefinitely and advertising this fork to others as superior to the original to use or as a canonical place to file issues, you should have a good reason. Communities are valuable; please don't divide them or throw them away lightly. Try working with the original maintainer first.
And what constitutes a good reason?
The epitome of open source is that you don't need to explain of your fork is really superior, the users will come.
RiiR certainly has it's place though. Ripgrep for me as a user is vastly superior to grep and a large reason for that I see is in the safe optimizations allowed by the borrow checker. They're certainly possible in C, but it wouldn't be maintainable.
Also I'd look at how stable the library is you're wrapping and the size of the code base. It may be lower effort to rewrite than to wrap.
Imagine a well-funded startup trying to make a name for themselves decided to fork the top 10 emerging open source projects, put their company name on them, and then spend millions in PR/marketing so that (A) it seems like they invented them, and (B) they fork the community. Are they free to? Is it right? What will it mean for the original authors and experts who created the software?
I happened to be reading this yesterday: dstat is dead. Red Hat decided to rewrite it using pcp, so the original author has given up. https://github.com/dagwieers/dstat/issues/170
Is Red Hat free to? (probably). Is it right? Now that's where I'd want to see a strong reason.
If the author of the original source had an issue with the above scenario, they would've chosen a more restrictive license that didn't make it possible.
This seems like the opposite of the usual ethical/legal distinction. It’s definitely legal to fork the project and the community, but not necessarily ethical.
I don’t think you can blame authors for not using a license that describes exactly what they are happy with. What constitutes an “ethical” fork is subjective, based on how necessary the fork is, and I don’t think a license could describe that.
Also, consider this analogy. The MIT license doesn’t contain a patent grant. So if some MIT-licensed software uses a patented technique, the software author and patent holder is within their legal rights to sue all forks of their for patent infringement. But this would be unethical, as the MIT license implies that the licensed software is given freely, not that you will sue all users of your software. Would you blame the sued parties for choosing to use MIT-licensed software, the way you are saying you would blame software authors for choosing a license that doesn’t forbid certain forks?
Really smart computer nerds emotionally wrapped up in change they aren’t interested in. They know what the future needs! To stay just like yesterday!
Gen X has become the old geezers who want you to stay off their lawn.
Oh what? It may not be super popular like Linux? We all have to work on the same code bases? Individual drive and curiosity verboten! Your one person project won’t satisfy the general user base? You should just focus on computing as we see it.
Who cares. Generate whatever syntax you want. They don’t have to organize around the semantics if they don’t want.
Gimme a break.