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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

> They don’t hinder anyone from forking and removing this limitation, allowing any package author to run native code on your machine.

That has arisen a few times here. Yes, they actually do actively discourage forking (to the point of threatening “excommunication” from the community).

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Just to correct this: for as long as I can remember, Evan's stance has been "feel free to fork Elm, just please don't call your fork Elm, since that would confuse people."

There have been a couple of forks with different names, and nobody's been "excommunicated" or whatever. The forks haven't gotten much traction, but they're probably still out there.

I have heard otherwise, both in comments here and via https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka..., but it’s entirely possible I’m wrong.

Added: This comment is also not terribly friendly.

https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...

My word choice certainly could have been better (I was upset, and it showed), but to quote what I said there anyway: "If you understand the design goals, but don't agree with them, why not channel that in a positive way - e.g. by building something that fits your vision instead of directly working against Elm's design goals?" - in substance, this is consistent with what I said above: it's totally encouraged if anyone wants to go in a different direction from Elm's design, just please don't call it Elm.

As it turned out, this is exactly what the OP in that thread did - he created https://www.mint-lang.com - which I think is a very positive development indeed!

I'm glad things turned out well. I definitely am hoping Elm can help me bootstrap into the more formal FP world.

That's not true, lamdera is a fork and has it's own channel inside elm slack. Terezka (that is from core team) already said that if part of the community wants to fork Elm, that would be ok.

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/clients-expressing-doubt-ab...

I have heard otherwise, both in comments here and via https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka..., but it’s entirely possible I’m wrong.

Added: This comment is also not terribly friendly.

https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...

Ah, I see, lamdera isn’t a “we’ll change Evan’s architectural decisions” kind of fork, which seems to be much of the source of contention.

Who cares? It’s a computer program, just have it do what purpose you require

Forking has long-term maintenance costs, even without the hassle of trying to hide your efforts from the Elm maintainers.

I’d be fine forking it to pursue a personal project. I’d never do that for any critical business need.

• Your company has a patch allowing installing binary code from other sources

• When you want to update to a new version of Elm, do git rebase and reapply the patch.

• Now your source tree and history is identical to upstream, plus one commit

Most likely the code restricting installing binaries from only one source isn’t changing a lot, so patch conflicts should not be too much of a hinderance

Yeah if anything the need to constantly fork the compiler indicates a problem lol.

It can be as simple as having a patch and just updating by reapplying the patch over the master branch. You’d have to build from source of course, rather than downloading someone else’s binaries.

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