I have identified a couple of open source projects on github.com that are not being kept up to date for many months. I have used them for personal use, and now want to make enhancements to them and start maintaining the code base and write sample clients that use these projects. I've sent pull requests to the authors and also followed up with emails via their personal / technical website contact page, with no responses from either 1 of them. I know that I can fork a project on github and be on my way. What I would like to know isIf I Fork an open source project and make improvements in the fork, will it or I offend the original authors? Meaning, could the original authors get upset down the line if my version of the project becomes popular and their version (the ones they are not maintaining or accepting pull requests actively) wanes in usage and popularity. A similar situation would be how Wordpress was forked from B2 and I think initially Mat Mullenweg and original B2 author had some difference of opinion / annoyances.Are there any licensing issues and copyright issues that I should be aware of? At present, the license.MD for both Projects says Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004 http://www.apache.org/licenses/
If I fork an open source project and make improvements in the fork, will it or I offend the original authors?
open source;github;apache license;forking
Eric Raymond wrote a thoughtful piece about this at one time.  The important point I think isWhen you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.Basically, will you offend them? It really depends on the them. What would be good to do is to  contact the developer and ask what she or he would thinks or prefers. Maybe that developer will say, why don't I make you a/the maintainer of the project, or maybe the developer will say, oh I thought no one cared, why don't you send me some pull requests and I'll push up some updates I have locally, or maybe the developer will say !#@$@ in which case yeah go ahead and fork it. Of course you must absolutely follow the terms of the license (which have some interestting twists but it's an osi approved license so it's okay to fork) and make sure you understand what they are. 