On Sun, 8 Jan 2023 at 11:12, Justin Mclean <jus...@classsoftware.com> wrote:
> The BSD license is compatible with the Apache license, so there are no > license or legal issues here. However in general, the ASF likes to play > nice with other communities and not have hostile forks. You would need to > come up with a good case to get the project accepted as an ASF incubating > project. > The intention is not to create a hostile fork, and things are not being driven by an acrimonious split in the community. I should also clarify for the record that I like and respect Elms BDFL a great deal and view the whole thing in an almost entirely positive light. Its a great piece of software; a well rounded vision and a lot of hard work has gone into making it so. The issue that is beginning to force a fork is that Elm is not really maintained. The 0.19.1 release came out in 2019, and there has been nothing since. The usual argument is that as a compiler and language, rapid change is not needed or appreciated, which is acceptable and certainly has benefits in providing a long term stable platform to build on top of. The difficulty is that there are bugs in the compiler and core packages and some of those have had patches submitted as pull requests on GitHub - none have been merged for around the last 4 years. Generally speaking, this has not been too much of a problem. Certainly every time I have hit a bug I have always managed to find a workaround and the severity of the issues has not been bad. But there is the ever present risk of hitting bugs and having no way to fix them. My expectation of a well run open source project, would be that patches are reviewed and accepted/rejected. Even if the feature set of a project does not evolve quickly, it is reasonable to expect a series of point releases that incorporate the acceptable contributed bug fixes. My view is that a business relying on a piece of open source software should always consider what the route to getting issues fixed is, and in this case it simply feels like a dead end. Every 6 months or so it crops up on the Elm Discourse forum, is discussed at length, and nothing changes. Working as a software architect I feel that as much as I like Elm, I would be dishonest if I did not score it as a DIVEST on a technology road map, due to these risks and uncertainty around its maintenance. Not to be too critical of the Elm BDFL though, he has a young family so perhaps has less time on his hands that he used to, and has also explained his perspective on things which is that he does not really enjoy this kind of working in public, and having to engage with forums and chat where strangers can make endless demands of him. We have to accept that we cannot force him to work in ways he doesn't want to and respect his choices. Hopefully this gives a truthful picture of things, though obviously this is my personal take on how things are with Elm.
