Plan to fork (So you don't have to fork)
MCLD 2002 | Thu 06 Aug 4:30 p.m.–5:15 p.m.
Presented by
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Rich Bowen
@https://mastodon.social/@rbowen
https://rcbowen.com/
Rich Bowen has been involved in open source since before we started calling it that. He's a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Rich is an Open Source Strategist at AWS, where he helps the company engage authentically with open source communities. He's the author of several books on Apache httpd, and has given hundreds of talks about open source community, governance, and sustainability at events around the world.
Rich Bowen
@https://mastodon.social/@rbowen
https://rcbowen.com/
Rich Bowen has been involved in open source since before we started calling it that. He's a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Rich is an Open Source Strategist at AWS, where he helps the company engage authentically with open source communities. He's the author of several books on Apache httpd, and has given hundreds of talks about open source community, governance, and sustainability at events around the world.
Abstract
If your product or service relies on an open source project, ensuring the sustainability of that project is just good business sense. Forking should be a last resort — considered only after all other options have been exhausted.
But here's the thing: writing a detailed plan to fork has two surprising benefits. First, it ensures that should the worst happen, you've already considered how you'll deal with it. But perhaps more importantly, the exercise of planning a fork forces you to confront exactly what makes your upstream project healthy — or fragile. It makes you a better upstream participant.
In this talk, we'll walk through what a fork plan looks like, what it reveals about project health, and how the act of planning for the worst can help you prevent it. We'll draw on real-world examples — some that forked and thrived, some that forked and struggled, and some that never had to fork because they invested upstream in time.
If your product or service relies on an open source project, ensuring the sustainability of that project is just good business sense. Forking should be a last resort — considered only after all other options have been exhausted.
But here's the thing: writing a detailed plan to fork has two surprising benefits. First, it ensures that should the worst happen, you've already considered how you'll deal with it. But perhaps more importantly, the exercise of planning a fork forces you to confront exactly what makes your upstream project healthy — or fragile. It makes you a better upstream participant.
In this talk, we'll walk through what a fork plan looks like, what it reveals about project health, and how the act of planning for the worst can help you prevent it. We'll draw on real-world examples — some that forked and thrived, some that forked and struggled, and some that never had to fork because they invested upstream in time.