People who don’t support forking don’t actually support the concept of open source/free software.
Forking is essential.
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Forking is essential.
I spent about a decade working with WP and wrote a lot of code for it, and had to read way more folks' code than I care to think about.
It's unique compared to other stacks I have worked with in that unlike ruby, python, node, or even Drupal, lots of businesses are often making money by selling submodules... which is strange because they are basically selling GPL code for a GPL'd stack.
In an environment like that, folks bristle at the suggestion of "forking" and will accuse folks of "stealing". WP.org has more or less endorsed that view.
I find it a bit nutty, but hey they all think I'm a crank. Maybe I am. Personally, I just made money fixing weird bugs that arose from that pile of cruft, or writing bespoke plugins for very niche purposes. It wasn't fun, but I got very good at dumb stuff for sure- it has some real problems but if it does what you want it's very easy to turn over to the marketing department.
There are plenty of contradictions in that anti-GPL point of view which can be seen in the fact that WP itself is a fork of an earlier project and it's main ecommerce setup was forked as well. But folks generally see what the want to see, I think.
Uh, what? Yes, that's how the license those authors chose for their code works. The other people aren't "thieves" for redistributing it.
Other people reading this, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ghc2o6/gpl_clar... for a representative example of odd discussions on the subject.