OT: Patching a source makes it a fork?

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 08/15/2014 09:23 AM, drago01 wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Richard Shaw
> <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm part curious and part venting....
>> 
>> I am trying to get a cross-platform project I'm working on
>> building natively on win32 as I've already got it working nicely
>> on Fedora and Fedora mingw.
>> 
>> I've ended up with the MSYS2 project, which while a big young
>> (try to find documentation!) I think it's a vast improvement on
>> the old msys/mingw project.
>> 
>> I was having trouble with the wxWidgets cmake module messing up
>> the parsing up the output from wx-config and I found the problem
>> and provided a *TRIVIAL* patch.
>> 
>> Next this guy tells me that we should upstream it (sure, always a
>> good idea) and wait until they incorporate it to fix it on msys2,
>> which of course would leave me without a working build (except
>> for the fact i already fixed it for myself) and anyone else who
>> needed it to work.
>> 
>> I thought I was done but next I was told: """ OTOH when you apply
>> a patch you are forking the project. This has severe consequences
>> for the community (and creates extra work for the maintainers.)
>> Right now MSYS2 CMake has a single, simple patch which is related
>> to MSYS2 itself, while your patch addresses a CMake bug which is 
>> not MSYS2-specific. The moment Alexey applies it, he is taking
>> the role of CMake maintainer. Multiply this by the hundreds of
>> packages MSYS2 has... """
>> 
>> Does patching software legally make it a fork?
> 
> I don't know how forking is defined legally or if it is at all but 
> technical yes it is a fork ... but so what?
> 

In terms of the resulting code being a derivative of the original
code, you *are* into copyright territory, so it depends on the terms
of the license that is in use.

As a general rule, I'd say that as long as a patch is under
consideration upstream (or is TRULY platform-specific), it's fine to
carry it in your packaging until the upstream gets around to
incorporating it.
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