This discussion about whether or not the "Elm community" will be meanies is missing the point and inventing a hypothetical scenario where you get kicked out of some club. Kind of a weird conjecture to me. I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm. The thing is that generally people who threaten to fork Elm are quite hostile on the Elm forums and subreddit.
If you fork Elm, an already tiny ecosystem, you'll realize that the hard part is building the community, not adding your pet features.
Everyone who has threatened to fork Elm has realized this at the end of the day. It's also why people overlook the lack of their pet features: because ecosystem is far more important.
> I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm.
One of my coworkers once edited the elm compiler to remove the native code restrictions, and placed it on NPM. Evan emailed him and asked him to take it down.
There may be more to the story that I don't know, but from what I know it sounds like Evan does care.
> I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm.
The article cites a comment by one of the elm core maintainers where that maintainer says he is opposed to the author forking Elm, and will consider it an attack on Elm's goals if he does. So I think we can safely discard this conjecture.
I don't understand your argument about ecosystem being far more important. People ceasing use of any of the tools necessarily removes them from the ecosystem and community. They have no reason to care about those things.
Definitely. At that point, they need to weigh the cost of migrating their existing project to a new platform, or to maintain the patches that will allow the old platform to have the flexibility they need.
It's important to remember that they aren't being removed from the Elm community - they can still use the packages, the compiler will still get updates they could presumably rebase their patches on.
If you fork Elm, an already tiny ecosystem, you'll realize that the hard part is building the community, not adding your pet features.
Everyone who has threatened to fork Elm has realized this at the end of the day. It's also why people overlook the lack of their pet features: because ecosystem is far more important.