cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/49567801
In these uncertain and divisive times, we appreciate Anthropic offering support to the Blender project in the form of a Patron-level membership. This enables the Blender team to keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators.
Francesco Siddi, CEO at Blender
The reality is far more complicated than that. Maintaining a large project takes a lot of work in practice, and you can’t just fork it and expect the fork to magically succeed. There are very few examples of such successful forks in the wild.
To add to this, when forks do succeed, it’s typically because they’re either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.
Exactly, taking over a large existing codebase is a herculean task. So, most forks just end up adding superficial changes on top and keeping upstream code as is.