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Comment by whelming_wave | Hacker News Reader

What would they do? I'm not sure there's an actual threat to follow through on. They can't block a forked compiler from, for example, using official packages without close-sourcing their own compiler (to prevent it from bringing in whatever change makes it work again).

At that point, why bother respecting the threat? A forked compiler isn't going to get maintainers? A package depending on the forked compiler isn't going to be maintained? The social cost is possibly something to think about, but if one is set on leaving the community anyways then it's a choice between you choosing to not interact with the community and them (possibly!) choosing to not interact with you.

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The community is more valuable than the code, because the community writes the code. So being cut off from the community is a major blow to a fork, and substantially increases their work burden.

Your fork isn't a significant amount of work, unless they've really threaded in the must-be-in-Elm-Kernel check throughout the entire compiler. Versus trying to rewrite your dependency in Elm rather than enabling importing JS, enabling JS is likely to be simpler since the functionality already exists to let Kernel modules do it.

This kind of dismissive response is in line with the examples provided in the OP.

This discussion about whether or not the "Elm community" will be meanies is missing the point and inventing a hypothetical scenario where you get kicked out of some club. Kind of a weird conjecture to me. I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm. The thing is that generally people who threaten to fork Elm are quite hostile on the Elm forums and subreddit.

If you fork Elm, an already tiny ecosystem, you'll realize that the hard part is building the community, not adding your pet features.

Everyone who has threatened to fork Elm has realized this at the end of the day. It's also why people overlook the lack of their pet features: because ecosystem is far more important.

> I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm.

One of my coworkers once edited the elm compiler to remove the native code restrictions, and placed it on NPM. Evan emailed him and asked him to take it down.

There may be more to the story that I don't know, but from what I know it sounds like Evan does care.

Did he take it down?

Yes.

> I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm.

The article cites a comment by one of the elm core maintainers where that maintainer says he is opposed to the author forking Elm, and will consider it an attack on Elm's goals if he does. So I think we can safely discard this conjecture.

I don't understand your argument about ecosystem being far more important. People ceasing use of any of the tools necessarily removes them from the ecosystem and community. They have no reason to care about those things.

But they’re almost certainly moving to a new platform with a community, which is much easier than trying to build one from scratch.

Definitely. At that point, they need to weigh the cost of migrating their existing project to a new platform, or to maintain the patches that will allow the old platform to have the flexibility they need.

It's important to remember that they aren't being removed from the Elm community - they can still use the packages, the compiler will still get updates they could presumably rebase their patches on.

It's still worth knowing that they're being jerks about it, since that falls outside of the social (but obviously not the legal) aspects of open source.

> falls outside of the social (but obviously not the legal) aspects of open source.

Not really, IMO. Forking a project used to be a really aggressive thing to do back before GitHub made it so common among younger waves of developers.

If you go to Evan and say, "Look, I want to use your thing but do it my way." and he says "No, I have a clear vision of what the thing is and it's not that. KTHXBYE." I don't think that's "being a jerk".

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