Differences? [LWN.net]

Differences?

Posted Mar 4, 2015 16:07 UTC (Wed) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274)
In reply to: Differences? by TMM
Parent article: GitLab acquires Gitorious

I have no issues that you have your own local modifications to a FLOSS project which you need to run your service.

But I would strongly encourage you to get involved in the upstream gogs community and try to get your modifications accepted there, if they are suitable for a larger audience. That is the true power of FLOSS; you have a possibility to take someone else's work and tinker with it to match your needs. But you must remember to always share back.

Without that co-operation, you can just as easily just end up with a large amount of forks which ends up with conflicting changes. And just forking does not help innovating and improving a FLOSS project. The innovation and improvements happens first when forks merges.

So please, get involved upstream; discuss your changes, submit patches. And there are two big pluses when your patches gets accepted: 1) Your changes requires less maintenance from you alone, and 2) more users can take advantage of your improvements.

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Differences?

Posted Mar 4, 2015 17:08 UTC (Wed) by TMM (guest, #79398) [Link] (2 responses)

Upstream isn't particularly interested in collaboration it seems.

Differences?

Posted Mar 4, 2015 18:11 UTC (Wed) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274) [Link]

That's a pity! But don't give up, use their mailing lists, forums or whatever public facing services they use. Figure out why they don't want to co-operate. But also spend time letting them know you as well, what your skills are and give good reasons why they should consider your changes, be visible to the whole community. Getting accepted into a community doesn't happen instantly, you need to be persistent and patient.

Of course, if you're always rejected in an inappropriate fashion (esp. if it happens publicly), then it is a completely different issue. Then promoting your own fork instead of the upstream is fair enough. But please let that be the last resort.

Looks decently collaborative to me

Posted Mar 5, 2015 16:36 UTC (Thu) by einar (guest, #98134) [Link]

It is? If you look at the open and closed PRs for Gogs, you see that there is a good number of outside contributors.