• Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 months ago

      This is the problem, making the fork known to the userbase of the original software. When the Atom text editor was killed by Microsoft we decided to fork it as Pulsar but it was an uphill struggle to really get the word out. We got a massive boost when the youtuber Distrotube featured us in an episode and again with an itsfoss article but we still routinely find people who have been using Atom without knowing we even exist.

      • lad@programming.dev
        0·
        5 months ago

        You found some more by commenting about it now.

        But if the fork is on GitHub there are some ways to search for the most maintained forks, albeit not with the GitHub tools which is unfortunate

        • Hexarei@programming.dev
          1·
          5 months ago

          There’s always the fork network graph, but it’s not exactly easy to spot which forks are good, just the ones with the most recent commits

  • dan@upvote.au
    2·
    5 months ago

    Keep in mind that software doesn’t have an expiry date. If a piece of software is unmaintained and doesn’t have an active fork but it still fulfills your use case and doesn’t have any major issues, there’s no need to replace it. Some of the software I use hasn’t seen any updates in five years but I still use it because it still works.

    Edit: As an example, a lot of people still use WinDirStat even though the latest release 1.1.2 is now 17 years old.

    • lad@programming.dev
      3·
      5 months ago

      I’d say that problems mostly come from the need to update dependencies in case of vulnerabilities being discovered. But not every software needs elevated privileges or can become a vector of attack, I guess

      • jcg@halubilo.social
        1·
        5 months ago

        I use windirstat almost monthly and have never heard of WizTree. Keeping this in mind for next time I use it.

        Though at this point, maybe I should just commit honestly

        • greencactus@lemmy.world
          0·
          5 months ago

          Sorry, that’s now how I meant my original post - I just thought that I really like SPD already and was interested in what PD makes better/ what features SPD missed. I in no way wanted to say that PD was bad, just was excited to know what PD made better :)

          • beetus@lemmy.world
            1·
            5 months ago

            I think you are misinterpreting the arrows. Pixel dungeon is the original game with SPD being the preferred fork

            The arrows aren’t PD > (greater than) SPD

            But rather PD -> (turned into) SPD

        • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, the original creators of StarOffice, which was proprietary. Sun open sourced OpenOffice, with StarOffice still available with proprietary add-ons. When Oracle bought up Sun, they first reduced resources to OpenOffice and then shut it down altogether when LibreOffice came along, with trademarks and such assigned to the Apache project.

      • deus@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 months ago

        The original OpenOffice is no longer in development. LibreOffice is an active fork of that.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          And I believe it’s being developed by some of the same people, too.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
    1·
    5 months ago

    yo but tbh this gets old.

    i just want my stuff to update without me having to find out a year later its unmantained and had a fork all along.

    or having to watch the repositories of stuff i use for signs it might be unmantained. i didnt know half the (popular!) stuff mentioned here was abandoned then forked.

    libforknotifier when (or even how)?

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        afaik it got bought by some company and people fear that there will be anti-user changes like with all the other open source projects that were bought by a company in recent years.

        • lastweakness@lemmy.world
          1·
          5 months ago

          No company has bought gitea. They just made a commercial entity which can accept contracts for enterprise installations and make some hyper specific customisations not needed for normal users (like some specific mode of internal authentication) in those installations. So far Gitea has been great still.

          • Neshura@bookwormstory.socialEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            They did start a cloud service for hosting Gitea which introduces a direct incentive for them to make Gitea less hosting friendly by, for example, making newly added configuration options less comfortable to set up. And more recently some changes to code contributions that are not exactly community friendly (as a result forgejo will be unable to upstream some of their changes)

            What lead to Forgejo, as far as I am aware, was less a problem that is already there and more the set of problems that have a very high chance of eventually manifesting, at which point forking the project would be too late.

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months ago

    Even better when someone forked it away from proprietary, closed-source, publicly-traded, for-profit, US-based, account-required, training-AI-on-your-code-then-selling-it-back-to-you Microsoft GitHub forge/social media network often with vendor lock-in to some other forge without all that BS.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
      0·
      5 months ago

      There’s no lock-in whatsoever on Github… And it’s free for open source projects…

      And no account is required unless you’re submitting code…

      The only valid thing here is the Github AI training honestly, but there is no reason to believe they can’t scan code from other repo’s.

      Also, its only a matter of time until Microsoft gets sued for it

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
        0·
        5 months ago

        only a matter of time until Microsoft gets sued

        https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ it’s been ongoing

        no account is required unless you’re submitting code

        it’s free

        Submitting issues & discussions require an account. Using the search for code requires an account. On Lemmy this week there was also a post about viewing “Discussions” & “Wiki” being A/B tested or whatever with an account required to view. Which is to say, if submitting patches, issues, & or using some features requires giving up personal info & agreeing to Microsoft’s ToS to create an account, you have locked out users & their freedom isn’t respected if their autonomy to not create an account with a company known for predatory behavior cannot be respected.

        lock-in

        Users locked out sucks, but so does lock in. Sure you can set a non Microsoft GitHub remote & push to it, but I’m talking about the forge on whole rather than the tool that backs it. The more Microsoft GitHub features you rely on, the more the existance of a ./.github directory’s or otherwise gets cited as being too hard to move. As more features get locked behind authentication, so will the APIs that allow some ability to migrate. GitHub were the popularizers of the “pull request” model too which is severely limiting but is the only way you can operate on their site (no stacked diffs, mailing patchsets, etc.) which eliminates alternating review methods (while you could use a third-party, due to MS GitHub’s ingrained workflow to too many, I’ve seen alternatives being considered as “too hard” rather than “different” (even if could be “better”)). I’ve also witnessed some communities like Elm freeload on the “free” hosting & require all community packages be upload to only MS GitHub or you can’t publish & by proxy participate in the community (or in their case even refer to other remotes, VCSs, tarballs for packages (even private ones) but that is due to Elm having a terrible default package manager).

        They’ve embraced a Git forge; they’ve extended the space with Codespaces, Sponsors, Actions, Copilot, even VS Code proliferation far beyond pre-acquisition GitHub; now we just await the extinguish part.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
    0·
    5 months ago

    “PIN number”

    vs.

    “FOSS software”

    Who’d win in a fight?